A teacher–student deep learning strategy for extreme low resolution unsafe action recognition in construction projects.

A large proportion of construction accidents are caused by workers' unsafe actions. Due to the complexity of the work environment and excessive demands of safety supervision on construction sites, many modern information technologies, such as computer vision (CV) technologies, have been increasingly applied and gradually replaced the traditional manual supervision to automatically identify unsafe behaviors from surveillance video data. Current models focus on high resolution (HR) video containing high quality features. However, challenges remain for more specific real-world construction scenarios, including but not limited to lack of high-quality data, far-field video recognition, privacy protection, and limited computing resources. To address the challenges, in this paper, a simple but effective method relying on the Teacher–Student Learning Architecture is proposed, where the teacher network assists the student network in effectively capturing useful features for downstream action recognition from extreme low resolution (eLR) video which can be easily transferred to other tasks. In addition, a Knowledge Learning Model and a similarity loss function are proposed to better guide the training of student network. In numerical experiments and case studies, our proposed training strategy achieves an top-1 accuracy of 28.53% and 71.81% on eLR HMDB dataset and eLR CMA dataset, 5.96% and 3.89% higher than the baseline model. The proposed strategy can make the automatic safety monitoring of construction works more accurate and reliable, thereby effectively reducing the accident rate and management cost. In addition, the performance of proposed strategy depends on efficient knowledge distillation methods, which may inspire future applications of CV-based deep learning models in construction management to achieve higher recognition results while maintaining low computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]