Use cases for contractors

This chapter examines the roles of infrastructure computer vision (ICV) from the viewpoints of contractors. Contractors are responsible for successful construction of facilities. On the sites, they need to conduct the construction and understand their performance in various dimensions, including safety, quality, time, and cost. The understanding part has been regarded as project monitoring and taken care of manually, for example, by visual observation of site superintendents. However, it is getting more and more difficult to rely on human observation for effective monitoring of the construction site. Ever-increasing size and complexity of today’s infrastructure adds to the problem. ICV provides new opportunities for construction project monitoring. The time-consuming and labor-intensive manual monitoring process can be automated. In addition, the frequency with which the monitoring is conducted can be significantly increased, potentially to the level of real time. The information generated from ICV could lead to optimal decisions that maximize the productivity with minimized usage of resources. The trend of decreasing IT costs, coupled with increasing computational powers, enables the unprecedented level of accuracy and timeliness in the monitoring of construction. This chapter shows the potential of ICV based on some recent achievements in construction automation.