Construction Safety Surveillance Using Machine Learning

Safety has always been a matter of concern in all industrial activities, especially construction. Hard hats or safety helmets act as the first line of protection against serious head injuries. Some workers don’t quite follow the instructions and signs that require them to follow safety measures. And in case of any accidents, the workers will not be eligible for insurance, if they were not wearing the safety equipments. This applied research paper mainly focuses to detect persons with and without a helmet in the construction site. The accuracy and performance of Neural Networks were tested and compared with other hand crafted features like Haar and LBP classifiers, Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Sequential Classifiers. These hand crafted features gave more false detections than neural nets, when tested in real conditions. Different Neural Networks were tested on Edge Devices such as Nvidia Jetson TX2 and Jetson Nano, for commercial deployment. Compared to the other neural networks, the SSD MobileNet model showed better performance without considerable drop in accuracy, when tested on edge devices in real-time. This makes it a preferable solution for this application-oriented problem.