Construction of Stretching-Bending Sequential Pattern to Recognize Work Cycles for Earthmoving Excavator from Long Video Sequences

Counting the number of work cycles per unit of time of earthmoving excavators is essential in order to calculate their productivity in earthmoving projects. The existing methods based on computer vision (CV) find it difficult to recognize the work cycles of earthmoving excavators effectively in long video sequences. Even the most advanced sequential pattern-based approach finds recognition difficult because it has to discern many atomic actions with a similar visual appearance. In this paper, we combine atomic actions with a similar visual appearance to build a stretching–bending sequential pattern (SBSP) containing only “Stretching” and “Bending” atomic actions. These two atomic actions are recognized using a deep learning-based single-shot detector (SSD). The intersection over union (IOU) is used to associate atomic actions to recognize the work cycle. In addition, we consider the impact of reality factors (such as driver misoperation) on work cycle recognition, which has been neglected in existing studies. We propose to use the time required to transform “Stretching” to “Bending” in the work cycle to filter out abnormal work cycles caused by driver misoperation. A case study is used to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that SBSP can effectively recognize the work cycles of earthmoving excavators in real time in long video sequences and has the ability to calculate the productivity of earthmoving excavators accurately.