Convolutional neural networks (CNN) based binary classifiers for construction machinery detection

Monitoring construction activities with artificial intelligence is an important task for efficiency in construction site operations. Hence the topic received a fair amount of attention in the literature. Successfully optimizing construction site operations by monitoring and detecting various tasks is dependent on the size of the construction field, which determines the tools that can be used for the job. A monitoring task that covers large areas can be performed with high efficiency through image classification algorithms by training the algorithms to detect construction machinery. If the area of monitoring is larger such as the task of detecting construction operations in a large territory, using drone images might also become inefficient. Consequently, satellite image classification has been performed for construction machinery detection in this thesis. A dataset that contains construction machinery images created from scratch using Google Earth was used to train convolutional neural networks. A total of 23 different pre-trained convolutional neural network models were modified with the transfer learning method and their performance was evaluated.