The present situation, matters and conceivable future needs for the maritime traffic observation

The maritime traffic system research has been studied for the safety and efficiency of the Marine Navigation. In order to evaluate the maritime traffic system, the vessel traffic observation is playing important roll. Recently, the way of collecting the vessel traffic information has been become fixed by using the radar, the AIS and the visual observations. However, it is still difficult to get the information about ships without the AIS. In this paper, the past vessel traffic observation results are shown. From those data and introducing the way of Japanese traffic survey, the recent matters of the vessel traffic observation are discussed.