Construction Site Safety Monitoring and Excavator Activity Analysis System

TL;DR

This paper presents a vision-based system for real-time construction site safety monitoring and excavator activity analysis using deep learning, improving detection speed and accuracy across diverse lighting conditions and scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perception and safety monitoring system utilizing YOLO v5 models, with enhanced speed and accuracy, applicable to general construction environments.

Findings

YOLO v5 models improve inference speed by up to 34 times.

YOLO v5 models increase detection accuracy by 2.7%.

Action recognition outperforms state-of-the-art by 5.18%.

Abstract

With the recent advancements in deep learning and computer vision, the AI-powered construction machine such as autonomous excavator has made significant progress. Safety is the most important section in modern construction, where construction machines are more and more automated. In this paper, we propose a vision-based excavator perception, activity analysis, and safety monitoring system. Our perception system could detect multi-class construction machines and humans in real-time while estimating the poses and actions of the excavator. Then, we present a novel safety monitoring and excavator activity analysis system based on the perception result. To evaluate the performance of our method, we collect a dataset using the Autonomous Excavator System (AES) including multi-class of objects in different lighting conditions with human annotations. We also evaluate our method on a benchmark construction dataset. The results showed our YOLO v5 multi-class objects detection model improved inference speed by 8 times (YOLO v5 x-large) to 34 times (YOLO v5 small) compared with Faster R-CNN/ YOLO v3 model. Furthermore, the accuracy of YOLO v5 models is improved by 2.7% (YOLO v5 x-large) while model size is reduced by 63.9% (YOLO v5 x-large) to 93.9% (YOLO v5 small). The experimental results show that the proposed action recognition approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on top-1 accuracy by about 5.18%. The proposed real-time safety monitoring system is not only designed for our Autonomous Excavator System (AES) in solid waste scenes, it can also be applied to general construction scenarios.