Recognizing workers' construction activities on a reinforcement processing area through the position relationship of objects detected by faster R-CNN

Abstract

Purpose

Recognizing every worker's working status instead of only describing the existing construction activities in static images or videos as most computer vision-based approaches do; identifying workers and their activities simultaneously; establishing a connection between workers and their behaviors.

Design/methodology/approach

Taking a reinforcement processing area as a research case, a new method for recognizing each different worker's activity through the position relationship of objects detected by Faster R-CNN is proposed. Firstly, based on four workers and four kinds of high-frequency activities, a Faster R-CNN model is trained. Then, by inputting the video into the model, with the coordinate of the boxes at each moment, the status of each worker can be judged.

Findings

The Faster R-CNN detector shows a satisfying performance with an mAP of 0.9654; with the detected boxes, a connection between the workers and activities is established; Through this connection, the average accuracy of activity recognition reached 0.92; with the proposed method, the labor consumption of each worker can be viewed more intuitively on the visualization graphics.

Originality/value

With this proposed method, the visualization graphics generated will help managers to evaluate the labor consumption of each worker more intuitively. Furthermore, human resources can be allocated more efficiently according to the information obtained. It is especially suitable for some small construction scenarios, in which the recognition model can work for a long time after it is established. This is potentially beneficial for the healthy operation of the entire project, and can also have a positive indirect impact on structural health and safety.

Citation

Li, J., Zhou, G., Li, D., Zhang, M. and Zhao, X. (2023), "Recognizing workers' construction activities on a reinforcement processing area through the position relationship of objects detected by faster R-CNN", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 1657-1678. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-04-2021-0312