Construction Progress Monitoring and Reporting using Digital Images and Computer Vision Techniques - A Review

In complex and dynamic construction sites, efficient progress monitoring and reporting play an important role in preventing schedule delays and cost overruns. Such reporting requires detailed and accurate records from job sites to help project managers in comparing project's current state to its as-planned state for enabling timely corrective actions. Currently used manual traditional progress reporting is time-consuming, costly, labor-intensive and can be inaccurate. Recently, there has been a shift toward utilization of digital images and computer vision techniques to overcome the above stated limitations and automate the tasks of progress reporting. This paper investigates current practices and research works to provide an overview of the main computer vision techniques, tools and applications for progress monitoring and reporting using digital images. The paper also provides current achievements, challenges, and future research direction in this domain. According to the findings it can be concluded that computer vision is a promising path for improving the performance of automated progress monitoring systems in construction.