PPE detector: a YOLO-based architecture to detect personal protective equipment (PPE) for construction sites

With numerous countermeasures, the number of deaths in the construction industry is still higher compared to other industries. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is constantly being improved to avoid these accidents, although workers intentionally or unintentionally forget to use such safety measures. It is challenging to manually run a safety check as the number of co-workers on a site can be large; however, it is a prime duty of the authority to provide maximum protection to the workers on the working site. From these motivations, we have created a computer vision (CV) based automatic PPE detection system that detects various types of PPE. This study also created a novel dataset named CHVG (four colored hardhats, vest, safety glass) containing eight different classes, including four colored hardhats, vest, safety glass, person body, and person head. The dataset contains 1,699 images and corresponding annotations of these eight classes. For the detection algorithm, this study has used the You Only Look Once (YOLO) family’s anchor-free architecture, YOLOX, which yields better performance than the other object detection models within a satisfactory time interval. Moreover, this study found that the YOLOX-m model yields the highest mean average precision (mAP) than the other three versions of the YOLOX.