Towards Edge-Cloud Architectures for Personal Protective Equipment Detection
This work addresses safety monitoring for construction workers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain without major innovations.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in images and video streams to enhance construction worker safety, proposing an edge-cloud and edge-only architecture for live recognition. It found that an edge-only deployment is feasible for counting safety helmets using YOLOX, based on preliminary evaluation at an active construction site.
Detecting Personal Protective Equipment in images and video streams is a relevant problem in ensuring the safety of construction workers. In this contribution, an architecture enabling live image recognition of such equipment is proposed. The solution is deployable in two settings -- edge-cloud and edge-only. The system was tested on an active construction site, as a part of a larger scenario, within the scope of the ASSIST-IoT H2020 project. To determine the feasibility of the edge-only variant, a model for counting people wearing safety helmets was developed using the YOLOX method. It was found that an edge-only deployment is possible for this use case, given the hardware infrastructure available on site. In the preliminary evaluation, several important observations were made, that are crucial to the further development and deployment of the system. Future work will include an in-depth investigation of performance aspects of the two architecture variants.