Oceanic trajectories frequently exhibit multiple periodic patterns across various time intervals, e.g., tidal variations, mesoscale eddies, and El Niño events correspond to diurnal, seasonal, and interannual fluctuations in environmental factors. To explore hidden spatiotemporal multiple periodic behaviors in noisy ocean data, we propose a novel trajectory clustering method, namely DTID-STFC. It first identifies dense time intervals (DTIs) in which trajectories occur frequently. Subsequently, within each DTI, it utilizes spectral embedding to project trajectories onto a latent subspace and proposes three-way fuzzy clustering to obtain results. We evaluate the proposed method on simulated datasets and compare it with traditional and state-of-the-art trajectory clustering approaches. Experimental results indicate that it outperforms other methods across all five metrics. Moreover, when applying the DTID-STFC method to the analysis of mesoscale cyclonic eddies in the South China Sea and vessel data, it demonstrates more discernible results than traditional methods, and it aligns well with physical oceanographic processes. This proposed method offers valuable insights into identifying periodic behaviors from complex and noisy spatiotemporal oceanic trajectory data.
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