A survey of visual tracking systems in construction industry with an approach to effective material management

Construction projects, by their nature, have dynamic environments with constant movement ofresources including laborers, materials, and equipment. Locating and tracking these resources iscritical in construction applications for achieving productivity and safety on site. The current practiceof tracking resources in construction is still largely dependent on manual systems, which often resultsin errors and delays jeopardizing entire projects. Therefore, inefficiency of the manual operations inreporting, recording and transferring field data in current tracking systems, which in turn adds to fieldoverhead costs, is still an important management function especially on large construction projects.The performance of materials management can be further improved if information about materials canbe collected in time, with ease and accuracy. This calls for development of more effective resourcepositioning and tracking solutions based on emerging automated technologies. In general, timelyinformation about construction resources can assist in fast and effective real-time decision making.Emerging localization and tracking technologies have spurred research efforts leading to automatedresource tracking and data acquisition for control and improvement of construction processes. In thispaper we present an overview of different visual tracking methods, which could be applied toconstruction industry.

Keywords:

Material management , Construction industry , visual sensing , Automated Material Tracking , Vision systems