Simultaneous Tracking of Multiple Construction Workers Using Stereo-Vision

Continuous research efforts have been made on acquiring location data on construction sites. As a result, GPS and RFID are increasingly employed on the site to track the location of equipment and materials. However, these systems are based on radio frequency technologies which require attaching tags on every target entity. Implementing the systems incurs time and costs for attaching/detaching/managing the tags or sensors. For this reason, efforts are currently being made to track construction entities using only cameras. Vision-based 3D tracking has been presented in a previous research work in which the location of construction manpower, vehicle, and materials were successfully tracked. However, the proposed system is still in its infancy and yet to be implemented on practical applications for two reasons. First, it does not involve entity matching across two views, and thus cannot be used for tracking multiple entities, simultaneously. Second, the use of a checker board in the camera calibration process entails a focus-related problem when the baseline is long and the target entities are located far from the cameras. This paper proposes a vision-based method to track multiple workers simultaneously. An entity matching procedure is added to acquire the matching pairs of the same entities across two views which is necessary for tracking multiple entities. Also, the proposed method simplified the calibration process by avoiding the use of a checkerboard, making it more adequate to the realistic deployment on construction sites.

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