Times-series data augmentation and deep learning for construction equipment activity recognition

Automated, real-time, and reliable equipment activity recognition on construction sites can help to minimize idle time, improve operational efficiency, and reduce emissions. Previous efforts in activity recognition of construction equipment have explored different classification algorithms anm accelerometers and gyroscopes. These studies utilized pattern recognition approaches such as statistical models (e.g., hidden-Markov models); shallow neural networks (e.g., Artificial Neural Networks); and distance algorithms (e.g., K-nearest neighbor) to classify the time-series data collected from sensors mounted on the equipment. Such methods necessitate the segmentation of continuous operational data with fixed or dynamic windows to extract statistical features. This heuristic and manual feature extraction process is limited by human knowledge and can only extract human-specified shallow features. However, recent developments in deep neural networks, specifically recurrent neural network (RNN), presents new opportunities to classify sequential time-series data with recurrent lateral connections. RNN can automatically learn high-level representative features through the network instead of being manually designed, making it more suitable for complex activity recognition. However, the application of RNN requires a large training dataset which poses a practical challenge to obtain from real construction sites. Thus, this study presents a data-augmentation framework for generating synthetic time-series training data for an RNN-based deep learning network to accurately and reliably recognize equipment activities. The proposed methodology is validated by generating synthetic data from sample datasets, that were collected from two earthmoving operations in the real world. The synthetic data along with the collected data were used to train a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based RNN. The trained model was evaluated by comparing its performance with traditionally used classification algorithms for construction equipment activity recognition. The deep learning framework presented in this study outperformed the traditionally used machine learning classification algorithms for activity recognition regarding model accuracy and generalization.