Integrated Object Detection and Blockchain Framework for Remote Safety Inspection at Construction Sites

Construction sites are characterized by dangerous situations and environments that cause fatal accidents. Potential risk detection needs to be improved by continuously monitoring site conditions. However, the current labor-intensive inspection practice has many limitations in monitoring dangerous conditions at construction sites. Computer vision technology that can quickly analyze and collect site conditions from images has been in the spotlight as a solution. Nonetheless, inspection results obtained via computer vision are still stored and managed in centralized systems vulnerable to tampering with information by the central node. Blockchain has been used as a reliable and efficient decentralized information management system. Despite its potential, only limited research has been conducted integrating computer vision and blockchain. Therefore, to solve the current safety management problems, the authors propose a framework for construction site inspection that integrates object detection and blockchain network, enabling efficient and reliable remote inspection. Object detection is applied to enable the automatic analysis of site safety conditions. As a result, the workload of safety managers can be reduced with inspection results stored and distributed reliably through the blockchain network. In addition, errors or forgery in the inspection process can be automatically prevented and verified through a smart contract. As site safety conditions are reliably shared with project participants, project participants can remotely inspect site conditions and make safety-related decisions in trust.