EAPSI: Construction progress: Monitoring and quality control using smartphones

Han Kook I, Savoy IL

Investigators

Abstract

Construction monitoring provides construction practitioners -owners, contractors, subcontractors, and tradesmen- with the information need for project control decisions. These decisions directly impact the overall efficiency of a construction project. Given that global construction spending is trillions of dollars, even small gains in efficiency could lead to enormous cost savings to the world. The goal of this project is to reduce both construction cost and delivery time with new progress monitoring and quality control. This information will be gathered from a large set of images and video streams that will be provided by consumer-level smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This research will be conducted at Seoul National University in South Korea in collaboration with Dr. Moonseo Park, an expert researcher in large-scale construction. The goal of the proposed project is to automate the process of large-scale building construction monitoring through advances in computer vision and construction management. This research will enhance and simplify current progress monitoring and quality control tasks on construction sites by providing automated 3D as-built models that can be used in conjunction with Building Information Models for analyzing progress and quality. Using inexpensive consumer-level smart devices, construction managers can easily collect data and quickly submit inputs to the server and visualize outcomes with interfaces that enable effective project control decisions. This will be achieved by addressing fundamental underlying research challenges in computer vision and construction management including improving the efficiency and reliability of image-based 3D reconstruction method through GPU-based architecture for structure-from-motion; recognizing material properties as well as geometry from 2D images; and establishing a grammar in augmented reality visualization for field reporting. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with National Research Foundation of Korea.