MF-GCN: Multimodal Information Fusion Using Incremental Graph Convolutional Network for Ship Behavior Anomaly Detection

Ship behavior anomaly detection is critical for intelligent perception and early warning in complex inland waterways, where single-source sensing (e.g., AIS-only or vision-only) is often fragile under occlusion, illumination variation, and signal noise. This study proposes MF-GCN, a multimodal (heterogeneous) information fusion framework based on an Incremental Graph Convolutional Network (IGCN) to detect and warn anomalous ship behaviors by jointly modeling AIS, video imagery, LiDAR point clouds, and water level signals. We first extract modality-specific features and enforce temporal–spatial consistency via timestamp and geo-referencing alignment, then construct an evolving graph in which nodes represent multimodal features and edges encode temporal dependency and semantic similarity. MF-GCN integrates a Semantic Clustering-based GCN (S-GCN) to inject historical semantic context and an Attentive Fusion-based GCN (A-GCN) to learn dynamic cross-modal correlations using multi-head attention. Experiments on our constructed real-world datasets demonstrate that MF-GCN achieves accuracies of 93.8%, 93.8%, and 93.3% with F1-scores of 93.6%, 93.6%, and 93.3% for ship deviation warning, bridge-crossing warning, and inter-ship collision warning, respectively, consistently outperforming representative baselines. These results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for robust multimodal anomaly detection and early warning in inland-waterway scenarios.