Towards Improving Workers' Safety and Progress Monitoring of Construction Sites Through Construction Site Understanding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight deep learning module called OP-Net that enhances object detection in construction site images by adaptively adjusting channel features, leading to improved safety and progress monitoring.

Contribution

The paper proposes the OP-Net module, a novel channel-wise feature adjustment technique that can be integrated into existing neural networks for better construction site object detection.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on SODA benchmark.

Maintained reasonable computational overhead.

Demonstrated effectiveness in construction safety monitoring.

Abstract

An important component of computer vision research is object detection. In recent years, there has been tremendous progress in the study of construction site images. However, there are obvious problems in construction object detection, including complex backgrounds, varying-sized objects, and poor imaging quality. In the state-of-the-art approaches, elaborate attention mechanisms are developed to handle space-time features, but rarely address the importance of channel-wise feature adjustments. We propose a lightweight Optimized Positioning (OP) module to improve channel relation based on global feature affinity association, which can be used to determine the Optimized weights adaptively for each channel. OP first computes the intermediate optimized position by comparing each channel with the remaining channels for a given set of feature maps. A weighted aggregation of all the channels will then be used to represent each channel. The OP-Net module is a general deep neural network module that can be plugged into any deep neural network. Algorithms that utilize deep learning have demonstrated their ability to identify a wide range of objects from images nearly in real time. Machine intelligence can potentially benefit the construction industry by automatically analyzing productivity and monitoring safety using algorithms that are linked to construction images. The benefits of on-site automatic monitoring are immense when it comes to hazard prevention. Construction monitoring tasks can also be automated once construction objects have been correctly recognized. Object detection task in construction site images is experimented with extensively to demonstrate its efficacy and effectiveness. A benchmark test using SODA demonstrated that our OP-Net was capable of achieving new state-of-the-art performance in accuracy while maintaining a reasonable computational overhead.