Organizing Video-Heavy Construction Projects With Artificial Intelligence

Using tech to monitor the progress of a jobsite & video-heavy construction projects with AI

The amount of photos and video taken of just a single construction project is astounding. And while the content is generated for data-driven results and feedback, it has plagued the industry with video-heavy projects that lack form and structure. The ability to store, label, and share media content is an advantage the industry has yet to benefit from. Yet it remains integral to checking the status of project milestones, a building’s health report, identifying safety issues, and generally ensuring the project runs according to plan.

To remedy the longstanding dilemma of video-heavy construction projects, CEO and founder of Smartvid.io, Josh Kanner, turned to technology. More specifically, Kanner turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to manage the plethora of data generated by construction projects.

Kanner’s vision for a smart construction field depends upon technology taking the place of people who typically are hired to spend hours combing through video and photos. Instead, Kanner’s implementation of AI analyzes media content via PC that uses synthetic vision and deep learning to pick out all the important bits of data about a construction project.

Some of what Smartvid.io can do includes using speech and image recognition to identify how to improve safety on jobsites, monitoring project teams, refining IT, productivity, quality assurance, and organizing and streamlining data. Through AI tech, Kanner breaks down Smartvid.io as such:

• Having the ability to automatically scan jobsite photos/videos for safety risks, such as who is wearing hard hats or safety glasses.
• Having the ability to monitor quality and track project progress, such as completion of key milestones.
• Having the ability to organize and control access to photos and videos from current and complete projects.

The AI tech recognizes things like hard hats, safety glasses, ductwork, construction vests, and other things common to construction sites. The tech works by applying smart tags to images and videos that enable its algorithms to easily search and find content related to a specific search inquiry. For example, if you wanted to highlight all pictures and video footage of duct work, the smart tags would pull all relevant content of ductwork. In otherwise video-heavy construction projects, this task could typically take hours. Kanner is looking to eliminate the wait-time down to seconds.

And the prospect of eliminating the tedious process of poring over hours’ worth of video-heavy construction projects has not gone lost on the industry. Autodesk invested an undisclosed amount of money into the AI-driven company, making Smartvid.io one of ten Forge partners Autodesk has financial interest in. The investment means that Smartvid.io works with Autodesk’s BIM 360 Field, too.

And as of last year, Smartvid.io was also picked up in a partnership with construction conglomerate Skanska USA. The construction monolith is now currently using Smartvid.io to organize and analyze photo, video, and voice data collected off of drones, smartphones, and other Internet-connected devices on the jobsite.

With capabilities to also project manage and plan, and security applications, Smartvid.io is aiming for longevity in the industry. And with the ability to organize, analyze, and identify video-heavy construction projects, including photos and other media, the AI technology is setting itself up for many different real-life use-cases.