Construction site safety monitoring and excavator activity analysis system

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) (Zhang et al., Sci Robot 6(55):eabc3164) 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 (Zhang et al., In Proceedings of the 38th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction 461 (ISARC), pp. 49–56. InternationalAssociation for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC), Dubai, UAE (2021). https://doi.org/10.22260/ISARC2021/0009). 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.