Automated In-Placed Brick Counting for Façade Construction Progress Estimation

Abstract

© ASCE 2014. The prevalent method of measuring progress is through manual site surveys. These surveys are tedious and time-consuming. They are also approximate, as counting the number of bricks in-place to compare against those ordered is a very laborious task compared to its end value. In previous research, the authors were able to count the number of bricks using single images. This paper presents a novel method for counting bricks in-placed to automate the brick site survey using digital videos. This method improves the brick counting method on image to a continuous counting in video frames. It can compare the brick detection results in successive frames and accumulate the counts when new bricks appear. The method works by the following two steps: (1) count the number of bricks on the brick facade on a single video frame, and (2) track the detected bricks with a kernel-based tracking approach to compare the difference in successive video frames to avoid double counting, and add new bricks to the count upon the appearance in the successive video frames. This paper also demonstrated a performance comparison of the kernel-based tracking approach and point-based tracking approach. Test results demonstrate that this method is capable of counting the number of bricks on a brick facade with acceptable error.