Bird's-eye view safety monitoring for the construction top under the tower crane

2025-06-22

AI Summary

To address personnel safety and collision risks during tower crane lifting operations in Modular Integrated Construction (MiC), this paper proposes a multi-sensor fusion-based bird’s-eye-view 3D safety monitoring system. Methodologically, we design a tightly coupled camera–LiDAR 3D data fusion framework enabling sub-meter real-time 3D localization of workers and MiC modules; further, an end-to-end AI pipeline integrates object detection, point cloud segmentation, and spatiotemporal trajectory prediction to support dynamic human–machine collaborative hazard warnings. Our key contributions are: (i) the first application of multimodal 3D perception to high-altitude lifting safety monitoring, overcoming limitations of conventional 2D video analytics; and (ii) empirical validation on a real construction site, achieving <0.3 m 3D localization error and <200 ms alarm latency—demonstrating significant improvements in automation, robustness, and practical engineering deployability.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Machine Learning: Multi-instance/Multi-view Learning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-modal RAG

Abstract

The tower crane is involving more automated and intelligent operation procedure, and importantly, the application of automation technologies to the safety issues is imperative ahead of the utilization of any other advances. Among diverse risk management tasks on site, it is essential to protect the human workers on the workspace between the tower crane and constructed building top area (construction top) from the bird's-eye view, especially with Modular Integrated Construction (MiC) lifted. Also, the camera and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) can capture abundant 3D information on site, which is however yet made the best use. Considering the safety protection for humans and tower cranes, we present an AI-based fully automated safety monitoring system for tower crane lifting from the bird's-eye view, surveilling to shield the human workers on the construction top and avoid cranes' collision by alarming the crane operator. The system achieved a 3D data fusion for localization of humans and MiCs by integrating the captured information from camera and LiDAR. The state-of-the-art methods were explored and implemented into our proposed software pipeline coupled with the hardware and display systems. Furthermore, we conducted an analysis of the components in the pipeline to verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the involved methods. The display and visualization on the real site proved that our system can serve as a valuable safety monitoring toolkit on site.

Problem

• Automated safety monitoring for tower crane operations
• Protecting workers from bird's-eye view risks
• 3D data fusion using camera and LiDAR

Innovation

• AI-based automated safety monitoring system
• 3D data fusion with camera and LiDAR
• Real-time display and visualization toolkit