Computer vision applications in construction: Current state, opportunities & challenges

Thousands of images and videos are collected from construction projects during construction. These contain valuable data that, if harnessed efficiently, can help automate or at least reduce human effort in diverse construction management activities such as progress monitoring, safety management, quality control and productivity tracking. Extracting meaningful information from images requires the development of technology and algorithms that enable computers to understand digital images or videos, replicating the functionality of human visual systems. This is the goal of computer vision. This review aims at providing an updated and categorized overview of computer vision applications in construction by examining the recent developments in the field and identifying the opportunities and challenges that future research needs to address to fully leverage the potential benefits of Computer Vision. We restrict the focus to four areas that can benefit the most from computer vision - Safety Management, Progress Monitoring, Productivity Tracking and Quality Control. • Construction industry captures tremendous amounts of visual data daily. • CV automates information extraction from visual data and augments the data-driven decision. • The paper provides an updated & categorized overview of CV applications in construction. • Use of different CV techniques in different areas of construction is discussed. • Opportunities and challenges that future research needs to address are identified.