• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.1202-1208
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• 2022

Techniques based on computer vision are becoming increasingly important in construction safety monitoring. Using AI algorithms can automatically identify conceivable hazards and give feedback to stakeholders. However, the construction site remains various potential hazard situations during the project. Due to the site complexity, many visual devices simultaneously participate in the monitoring process. Therefore, it challenges developing and operating corresponding AI detection algorithms. Safety information resulting from computer vision needs to organize before delivering it to safety managers. This study proposes a framework for computer vision-aided construction safety monitoring using collaborative 4D BIM information to address this issue, called CSM4D. The suggested framework consists of two-module: (1) collaborative BIM information extraction module (CBIE) extracts the spatial-temporal information and potential hazard scenario of a specific activity; through that, Computer Vision-aid Safety Monitoring Module (CVSM) can apply accurate algorithms at the right workplace during the project. The proposed framework is expected to aid safety monitoring using computer vision and 4D BIM.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2020.12a
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• pp.87-95
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• 2020

Generally, occupational safety and particularly construction safety is an intricate phenomenon. Industry professionals have devoted vital attention to enforcing Occupational Safety and Health (OHS) from the last three decades to enhance safety management in construction. Despite the efforts of the safety professionals and government agencies, current safety management still relies on manual inspections which are infrequent, time-consuming and prone to error. Extensive research has been carried out to deal with high fatality rates confronting by the construction industry. Sensor systems, visualization-based technologies, and tracking techniques have been deployed by researchers in the last decade. Recently in the construction industry, computer vision has attracted significant attention worldwide. However, the literature revealed the narrow scope of the computer vision technology for safety management, hence, broad scope research for safety monitoring is desired to attain a complete automatic job site monitoring. With this regard, the development of a broader scope computer vision-based risk recognition system for correlation detection between the construction entities is inevitable. For this purpose, a detailed analysis has been conducted and related rules which depict the correlations (positive and negative) between the construction entities were extracted. Deep learning supported Mask R-CNN algorithm is applied to train the model. As proof of concept, a prototype is developed based on real scenarios. The proposed approach is expected to enhance the effectiveness of safety inspection and reduce the encountered burden on safety managers. It is anticipated that this approach may enable a reduction in injuries and fatalities by implementing the exact relevant safety rules and will contribute to enhance the overall safety management and monitoring performance.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.893-903
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• 2022

Recently, computer vision (CV)-based safety monitoring (i.e., object detection) system has been widely researched in the construction industry. Sufficient and high-quality data collection is required to detect objects accurately. Such data collection is significant for detecting small objects or images from different camera angles. Although several previous studies proposed novel data augmentation and synthetic data generation approaches, it is still not thoroughly addressed (i.e., limited accuracy) in the dynamic construction work environment. In this study, we proposed a game engine-driven synthetic data generation model to enhance the accuracy of the CV-based object detection model, mainly targeting small objects. In the virtual 3D environment, we generated synthetic data to complement training images by altering the virtual camera angles. The main contribution of this paper is to confirm whether synthetic data generated in the game engine can improve the accuracy of the CV-based object detection model.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2020.11a
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• pp.55-56
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• 2020

The construction industry has the highest occupational fatality and injury rates related to accidents of any industry. Accordingly, safety managers closely monitor to prevent accidents in real-time by installing surveillance cameras at construction sites. However, due to human cognitive ability limitations, it is impossible to monitor many videos simultaneously, and the fatigue of the person monitoring surveillance cameras is also very high. Thus, to help safety managers monitor work and reduce the occupational accident rate, a study on object recognition in construction sites was conducted through surveillance cameras. In this study, we applied to the instance segmentation to identify the classification and location of objects and extract the size and shape of objects in construction sites. This research considers ways in which deep learning-based computer vision technology can be applied to safety management on a construction site.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.313-316
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• 2015

Construction is one of the most dangerous job sectors, which reports tens of thousands of time-loss injuries and deaths every year. These disasters incur delays and additional costs to the projects. The safety management needs to be on the top primary tasks throughout the construction to avoid fatal accidents and to foster safe working environments. One of the safety regulations that are frequently violated is the wearing of personal protection equipment (PPE). In order to facilitate monitoring of the compliance of the PPE wearing regulations, this paper proposes a vision based method that automatically identifies whether workers wear hard hats and safety vests. The method involves three modules - human body detection, identification of safety vest wearing, and hard hat detection. First, human bodies are detected in the video frames captured by real-time on-site construction cameras. The detected human bodies are classified into with/without wearing safety vests based on the color features of their upper parts. Finally, hard hats are detected on the nearby regions of the detected human bodies and the locations of the detected hard hats and human bodies are correlated to reveal their corresponding matches. In this way, the proposed method provides any appearance of the workers without wearing hard hats or safety vests. The method has been tested on onsite videos and the results signify its potential to facilitate site safety monitoring.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.1243-1244
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• 2022

In recent years, the growing interest in off-site construction has led to factories scaling up their manufacturing and production processes in the construction sector. Consequently, continuous large-scale site monitoring in low-variability environments, such as prefabricated components production plants (precast concrete production), has gained increasing importance. Although many studies on computer vision-based site monitoring have been conducted, challenges for deploying this technology for large-scale field applications still remain. One of the issues is collecting and transmitting vast amounts of video data. Continuous site monitoring systems are based on real-time video data collection and analysis, which requires excessive computational resources and network traffic. In addition, it is difficult to integrate various object information with different sizes and scales into a single scene. Various sizes and types of objects (e.g., workers, heavy equipment, and materials) exist in a plant production environment, and these objects should be detected simultaneously for effective site monitoring. However, with the existing object detection algorithms, it is difficult to simultaneously detect objects with significant differences in size because collecting and training massive amounts of object image data with various scales is necessary. This study thus developed a large-scale site monitoring system using edge computing and a small-object detection system to solve these problems. Edge computing is a distributed information technology architecture wherein the image or video data is processed near the originating source, not on a centralized server or cloud. By inferring information from the AI computing module equipped with CCTVs and communicating only the processed information with the server, it is possible to reduce excessive network traffic. Small-object detection is an innovative method to detect different-sized objects by cropping the raw image and setting the appropriate number of rows and columns for image splitting based on the target object size. This enables the detection of small objects from cropped and magnified images. The detected small objects can then be expressed in the original image. In the inference process, this study used the YOLO-v5 algorithm, known for its fast processing speed and widely used for real-time object detection. This method could effectively detect large and even small objects that were difficult to detect with the existing object detection algorithms. When the large-scale site monitoring system was tested, it performed well in detecting small objects, such as workers in a large-scale view of construction sites, which were inaccurately detected by the existing algorithms. Our next goal is to incorporate various safety monitoring and risk analysis algorithms into this system, such as collision risk estimation, based on the time-to-collision concept, enabling the optimization of safety routes by accumulating workers' paths and inferring the risky areas based on workers' trajectory patterns. Through such developments, this continuous large-scale site monitoring system can guide a construction plant's safety management system more effectively.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.40-41
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• 2021

The construction industry has the highest occupational accidents/injuries among all industries. Korean government installed surveillance camera systems at construction sites to reduce occupational accident rates. Construction safety managers are monitoring potential hazards at the sites through surveillance system; however, the human capability of monitoring surveillance system with their own eyes has critical issues. Therefore, this study proposed to build a deep learning-based safety monitoring system that can obtain information on the recognition, location, identification of workers and heavy equipment in the construction sites by applying multiple-object tracking with instance segmentation. To evaluate the system's performance, we utilized the MS COCO and MOT challenge metrics. These results present that it is optimal for efficiently automating monitoring surveillance system task at construction sites.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.304-309
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• 2015

On construction sites, it is important to monitor the performance of construction equipment and workers to achieve successful construction project management; especially, vision-based detection methods have advantages for the real-time site data collection for safety and productivity analyses. Although many researchers developed vision-based detection methods with acceptable performance, there are still limitations to be addressed: 1) sensitiveness to the shape and appearance changes of moving objects in difference working postures, and 2) high computation time. To deal with the limitations, this paper proposes a detection algorithm of construction equipment based on Integral Channel Features. For validation, 16,850 frames of video streams were recorded and analyzed. The results showed that the proposed method worked in high performance in terms of accuracy and processing time. In conclusion, the developed method can help to understand useful site information including working pattern, working time and input manpower analyses.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.715-728
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• 2022

Recently, numbers of long span pedestrian suspension bridges have been constructed worldwide. While recent tragedies regarding pedestrian suspension bridges have shown how these bridges can wreak havoc on the society, there are no specific guidelines for construction standards nor safety inspections yet. Therefore, a structural health monitoring system that could help ensure the safety of pedestrian suspension bridges are needed. System identification is one of the popular applications for structural health monitoring method, which estimates the dynamic system. Most of the system identification methods for bridges are currently adapting output-only system identification method, which assumes the dynamic load to be a white noise due to the difficulty of measuring the dynamic load. In the case of pedestrian suspension bridges, the pedestrian load is within specific frequency range, resulting in large errors when using the output-only system identification method. Therefore, this study aims to develop a system identification method for pedestrian suspension bridges considering both input and output of the dynamic system. This study estimates the location and the magnitude of the pedestrian load, as well as the dynamic response of the pedestrian bridges by utilizing artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques. A simulation-based validation test was conducted to verify the performance of the proposed system. The proposed method is expected to improve the accuracy and the efficiency of the current inspection and monitoring systems for pedestrian suspension bridges.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2022.06a
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• pp.353-360
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• 2022

Due to the dense and complicated working environment, the construction industry is susceptible to many accidents. Worker's fall is a severe problem at the construction site, including falling into holes or openings because of the inadequate coverings as per the safety rules. During the construction or demolition of a building, openings and holes are formed in the floors and roofs. Many workers neglect to cover openings for ease of work while being aware of the risks of holes, openings, and gaps at heights. However, there are safety rules for worker safety; the holes and openings must be covered to prevent falls. The safety inspector typically examines it by visiting the construction site, which is time-consuming and requires safety manager efforts. Therefore, this study presented a worker-driven approach (the worker is involved in the reporting process) to facilitate safety managers by developing integrated computer vision and inertia sensors-based mobile applications to identify openings. The TensorFlow framework is used to design Convolutional Neural Network (CNN); the designed CNN is trained on a custom dataset for binary class openings and covered and deployed on an android smartphone. When an application captures an image, the device also extracts the accelerometer values to determine the inclination in parallel with the classification task of the device to predict the final output as floor (openings/ covered), wall (openings/covered), and roof (openings / covered). The proposed worker-driven approach will be extended with other case scenarios at the construction site.