Enhancing Occlusion Robustness for Vision-based Construction Worker Detection Using Data Augmentation

Occlusion is one of the most challenging problems for computer vision-based construction monitoring. Due to the intrinsic dynamics of construction scenes, vision-based technologies inevitably suffer from occlusions. Previous researchers have proposed the occlusion handling methods by leveraging the prior information from the sequential images. However, these methods cannot be employed for construction object detection in non-sequential images. As an alternative occlusion handling method, this study proposes a data augmentation-based framework that can enhance the detection performance under occlusions. The proposed approach is specially designed for rebar occlusions, the distinctive type of occlusions frequently happen during construction worker detection. In the proposed method, the artificial rebars are synthetically generated to emulate possible rebar occlusions in construction sites. In this regard, the proposed method enables the model to train a variety of occluded images, thereby improving the detection performance without requiring sequential information. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by showing that the proposed method outperforms the baseline model without augmentation. The outcomes demonstrate the great potential of the data augmentation techniques for occlusion handling that can be readily applied to typical object detectors without changing their model architecture.