Abstract:Recently, the navigation technology achieves fast development and is playing an increasingly important role in areas of trading, military, and scientific research. About the route planning, simulation, monitoring and tracking of ship, more detailed and more comprehensive researches are being done. This paper focuses on the shipping route estimation based on discrete track dots, which is used for shipping route display in the situation map. To estimate a possible and smooth route going through all track dots, we propose a coarse-to-fine method, mainly including three levels. This method uses the experience nautical chart and the global sea and land distribution map, which are easy to get and help to achieve fast route simulation. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed coarse-to-fine shipping route estimation algorithm can fulfill the route simulation task. Meanwhile, the proposed method also can be used for shipping route planning before sailing. However, there are some problems about the proposed algorithm, such as without considering the water-depth condition which may influence the shipping route, but the research will continue.