Multimodal Trip Hazard Affordance Detection on Construction Sites

Trip hazards are a significant contributor to accidents on construction and manufacturing sites. Current safety inspections are labor intensive and limited by human fallibility, making automation of trip hazard detection appealing from both a safety and economic perspective. Trip hazards present an interesting challenge to modern learning techniques because they are defined as much by affordance as by object type, for example, wires on a table are not a trip hazard, but can be if lying on the ground. To address these challenges, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the performance characteristics of 11 different colors and depth fusion approaches, including four fusion and one nonfusion approach, using color and two types of depth images. Trained and tested on more than 600 labeled trip hazards over four floors and 2000 m
²
in an active construction site, this approach was able to differentiate between identical objects in different physical configurations. Outperforming a color-only detector, our multimodal trip detector fuses color and depth information to achieve a 4% absolute improvement in F1-score. These investigative results and the extensive publicly available dataset move us one step closer to assistive or fully automated safety inspection systems on construction sites.