Vision-Based Detection Method for Construction Site Monitoring by Integrating Data Augmentation and Semisupervised Learning

Training deep learning models for vision-based monitoring of construction sites usually requires a large amount of labeled data. Semisupervised learning methods can efficiently obtain unlabeled data with substantial cost savings. Thus, this paper proposes a semisupervised object detection method for construction site monitoring. Weather as well as strong and weak data augmentation are integrated to cope with the complex construction site conditions (weather changes, camera view shifts, and so on) by integrating semisupervised learning to leverage the valid information in unlabeled construction site images. To validate its effectiveness, the proposed method was tested on the Alberta Construction Image Data Set (ACID), a public data set for the construction research community. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy [mean average precision (mAP)] of 81.1% when trained on only 3% of the labeled images. This study helps to significantly reduce the development cost of vision-based object detection models for construction sites.