Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The main objective of this Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) project is to create a novel vision-based prototype that could help Hydro-Québec monitor the use of labor and equipment resources at construction jobsites. Currently, Hydro-Québec mainly relies on the regular observations from field inspectors to manually perform jobsite monitoring. This manual monitoring practice is not available in all construction projects. Also, it could not monitor the labor and equipment resources all the time. Considering these limitations, Hydro-Québec plans to install multiple video cameras at the jobsites to facilitate the monitoring work of the field inspectors. The prototype created in this CR&D project is expected to automatically retrieve the labor and equipment information from the jobsite videos captured by these cameras. It first uses the video streams to generate the 3D point cloud of the jobsite. Then, construction workers and equipment in the point cloud are detected and tracked along the timeline. Based on the detection and tracking results, the working hours of the labor and equipment resources at the jobsite are statistically analyzed and associated with the jobsite work zones. This way, Hydro-Québec has a preliminary idea about the actual labor and equipment costs incurred in each work zone for the sake of detecting potential cost overruns. There are two major benefits associated with the prototype. First, it will significantly reduce the manpower and money required in the current manual monitoring practice. In addition, the monitoring with video streams could help Hydro-Québec detect potential project delays in terms of equipment and labor utilization as early as possible.