Marine traffic data is often noisy: signals are lost, positions “jump” on the map, and speeds sometimes look physically impossible. This is especially challenging in sensitive maritime zones, including areas close to critical and underwater infrastructures, where reliable information is essential for security and risk assessment.

The publication “Automated maritime movement analysis for special-interest targets” presents a method that automatically cleans and analyses sea tracks in real time. It validates movements against realistic speed and distance limits, removes clearly unrealistic points, and uses simple interpolation to bridge data gaps, before calculating speed and direction with geodetic formulas that consider Earth’s curvature.

Within UnderSec, this work helps transform volatile, raw data into trustworthy trajectories that better reflect how vessels actually move around special-interest areas. This supports more informed monitoring of traffic patterns that may interact with critical seabed infrastructures and other underwater assets.