Video analysis for tower crane production rate estimation

Construction equipment production rates are considered an influential factor in construction projects’ success as 30–40% of construction cost overruns are attributed to insufficient equipment production rates. The tower crane is one of the heavy construction equipment, and its production rate has a huge impact on the construction project’s performance. Current estimations of the tower crane production rate on construction sites are not backed by a universally accepted and applicable methodology. However, vision-based technologies have been utilized recently for determining the production rates of construction equipment. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to develop a vision-based research framework (VRF) with a user-friendly interface for a practical and speedy measure of tower crane actual cycle time on construction sites. The software will be developed based on eight single object tracking detection free algorithms. Moreover, the VFR will be evaluated by measuring tower cranes’ cycle time in two case studies in Egypt. For each case study, five videos were recorded for the tower cranes. The cycle time in each video was measured by using manual inspection and by the VRF. The VRF achieved high accuracy in tracking the cycle time for the tower crane in the two case studies.