SBIR Phase I: Analysis of Progress Photos for Indoor Construction Progress Monitoring

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that it will save billions of dollars by anticipating construction delays and streamlining coordination to prevent them. Lower costs will help upgrade our nation's infrastructure, which is a critical national priority. Many construction companies strongly want a solution to indoor progress monitoring. Laser scanning is too expensive and slow, and photography services can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for large projects and introduce logistical challenges. The proposed research would simplify the workflow for progress monitoring of interiors by automatically registering 360 degree photos and video and aligning them to building information models (BIM), providing a cheap, quick, and effective solution for daily progress monitoring. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to localize images, reconstruct 3D models, align them to floorplans or 3D BIM, and use the aligned models to provide actionable data to construction managers. A main challenge is to robustly solve for camera pose using structure-from-motion in indoor scenes that are unfinished and contain textureless and reflective surfaces. A second challenge is to automatically or semi-automatically register the models to 2D or 3D plans, made more difficult by the fact that the site is incomplete and constantly changing. A third challenge is to create interfaces that project personnel can use to perform visual inspection, progress monitoring, requests for information, and other supervision and coordination tasks. The project will investigate the use of tags (i.e., markers) to improve robustness of 3D reconstruction and to perform registration without requiring the 3D positions of tags to be known in advance. Thus, the project addresses major unsolved problems in computer vision, robotics, and their application to construction management. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.