Management of safe distancing on construction sites during COVID-19: A smart real-time monitoring system

The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses a great threat to the world. One mandatory and efficient measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on construction sites is to ensure safe distancing during workers’ daily activities. However, manual monitoring of safe distancing during construction activities can be toilsome and inconsistent. This study proposes a computer vision-based smart monitoring system to automatically detect worker breaching safe distancing rules. Our proposed system consists of three main modules: (1) worker detection module using CenterNet; (2) proximity determination module using Homography; and (3) warning alert and data collection module. To evaluate the system, it was implemented in a construction site as a case study. This study has two key contributions: (1) it is demonstrated that monitoring of safe distancing can be automated using our approach; and (2) CenterNet, an anchorless detection model, outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches in the real-time detection of workers.