2D Part-Based Visual Tracking of Hydraulic Excavators

Abstract

Visual tracking has been widely applied in construction industry and attracted significant interests recently. Lots of research studies have adopted visual tracking techniques on the surveillance of construction workforce, project productivity and construction safety. Until now, visual tracking algorithms have gained promising performance when tracking un-articulated equipment in construction sites. However, state-of-art tracking algorithms have unguaranteed performance in tracking articulated equipment, such as backhoes and excavators. The stretching buckets and booms are the main obstacles of successfully tracking articulated equipment. In order to fill this knowledge gap, the part-based tracking algorithms are introduced in this paper for tracking articulated equipment in construction sites. The part-based tracking is able to track different parts of target equipment while using multiple tracking algorithms at the same sequence. Some existing tracking methods have been chosen according to their outstanding performance in the computer vision community. Then, the part-based algorithms were created on the basis of selected visual tracking methods and tested by real construction sequences. In this way, the tracking performance was evaluated from effectiveness and robustness aspects. Throughout the quantification analysis, the tracking performance of articulated equipment was much more improved by using the part-based tracking algorithms.