International Journal of Construction Management

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Improved detection network model based on

YOLOv5 for warning safety in construction sites

Nguyen Ngoc-Thoan, Dao-Quang Thanh Bui, Cuong N. N. Tran & Duc-Hoc

Tran

To cite this article: Nguyen Ngoc-Thoan, Dao-Quang Thanh Bui, Cuong N. N. Tran & Duc-
Hoc Tran (2024) Improved detection network model based on YOLOv5 for warning safety in
construction sites, International Journal of Construction Management, 24:9, 1007-1017, DOI:
10.1080/15623599.2023.2171836

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Published online: 09 Feb 2023.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT
2024, VOL. 24, NO. 9, 1007–1017
https://doi.org/10.1080/15623599.2023.2171836

Improved detection network model based on YOLOv5 for warning safety in

construction sites
Nguyen Ngoc-Thoana, Dao-Quang Thanh Buib,c, Cuong N. N. Trand and Duc-Hoc Tranb,c
a
Faculty of Building and Industrial Construction, Hanoi University of Civil Engineering (HUCE), Ha Noi, Viet Nam; bFaculty of Civil Engineering,
Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; cVietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, Linh Trung
Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; dFaculty of International Business and Economics, University of Economics and Business, Vietnam National
University, Hanoi, Vietnam

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The safety of worker guarantee is a crucial task in construction site management. Many accidents occur Received 6 November 2022
in construction sites by falling, collisions, electrocutions, or being stuck in operating devices. The suitable Accepted 19 January 2023
personal protective equipment (PPE) stated in safety rules is widely used to ensure workers’ safety. The
use of PPE is relied on traditional methods such as physical monitoring and video observation that waste KEYWORDS
classification; computer
time, poor timeliness, and missed inspections. To overcome these limitations, this study utilized newly vision; construction safety;
You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm, named YOLOv5, which includes four network structures, namely object detection; YOLO
YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l, and YOLOv5x for safety detection. A data set with 11978 samples was
used to establish a digital safety monitoring system via training and testing phases. The comparison
results among the four models show that the YOLOv5s performed the best and the average detection
speed reached 110 frames per second, which fulfils the real-time detection requirements. This study con-
tributes to the state of the knowledge by (i) providing a one-step solution for the automatic identification
the PPE on construction sites; (ii) proposing a valuable tool to assist site safety engineer in the task of
automatically detecting the PPE worn by construction workers; and (iii) the effectiveness and superiority
of the presented approach are demonstrated via large detection dataset with 11978 samples and real
construction case.

HIGHLIGHTS
1. Providing a one-step solution for automatic identification the PPE on construction sites in contrast to
widely used multi-phase hardhat wearing detection methods
2. Introducing four network structures of new YOLO version named as YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l,
and YOLOv5x for automatic detection of the PPE worn by construction worker.
3. Constructing a new PPE detection dataset with 11978 samples that cover considerable variations.

Introduction workers sometimes disregard the mandatory safety requirements

Construction site works are among the most hazardous jobs in
industrial sectors. Although construction involves a strong need
for workers, digitalization is rarely applied to change productivity
via automation and artificial intelligence (Wu et al. 2019; Chung
et al. 2020). According to the United States Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the construction industry has a higher rate of fatal
occupational accidents than the national average (Bureau of
Labor Statistics 2020). Construction accidents account for nearly
30% of all workplace accidents in the United Kingdom, while in
China, the number of fatal injuries in housing and municipal
construction projects is expected to reach nearly 1000 cases by
2021 (Development and M.t.M.o.H.a.U.-R 2017). Traumatic
brain injuries are responsible for approximately 24% of all con-
struction fatalities. As a result, procedures and policies are
needed to ensure construction safety (Bhagwat and Delhi 2021).
Personal protective equipment (PPE) such as hardhats, gloves,
vests, and safety goggles is an essential tool for risk management.
However, despite having been trained and educated in advance,
at construction sites for a variety of reasons. As a result, current
safety control practices rely heavily on detectors’ manual moni-
toring and reporting (Lee et al. 2021).
Several researchers have proposed methods for automatically
detecting personal protective equipment in order to enhance the
quality of safety inspection jobs (Akinlolu et al. 2022; Liu et al.
2022; Yap et al. 2022). The vision-based techniques almost dom-
inate the costly sensor-based solutions (Kelm et al. 2013;
Shrestha et al. 2015; Fang et al. 2020; Guo et al. 2021). Typically,
the construction site surveillance camera serves as a frame, and
vision-based approaches execute hardhat wearing detection
through several phases, including hardhat localization and identi-
fication, which primarily include human movement identification
(Fang et al. 2018). Despite numerous extensive studies, vision-
based methods for detecting PPE remain complicated (Wu and
Zhao 2018; Paneru and Jeelani 2021). The current study was car-
ried out in specific scenes, which pose difficulties in generalising
to other construction sites with high variability in background
and pedestrian states (Deng et al. 2022a). The surveillance

CONTACT Duc-Hoc Tran tdhoc@hcmut.edu.vn Faculty of Civil Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), 268 Ly Thuong Kiet Street,
District 10, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
ß 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
1008 N. NGOC-THOAN ET AL.
camera has trouble distinguishing between small objects and
background noise and overlapping instances. Furthermore, some
samples may have a similar image region or partial occlusion
that makes detection difficult. Finally, there are no datasets avail-
able for developing and testing models for detecting PPE in a
variety of situations (Rao et al. 2022).
The majority of recent vision-based methods are only con-
cerned with detecting hardhats on construction sites. Other
equipment, such as safety vests, gloves, safety goggles, and steel
toe shoes, should be monitored in addition to the hardhat to
ensure worker safety. A variety of studies has been conducted to
identify multi-class PPE (Nath et al. 2020). Open-access commer-
cial software, named smartvid.io, is based on deep learning for
multiple PPE components detection. The real time detection
methodology of PPE is considerable significance to assure safety;
however, it is scant in the literature (Xie et al. 2018). Recent
studies considered the real time term as processing at least 5
video frames per second (FPS) (Redmon et al. 2016; Redmon
and Farhadi 2017). Due to the fast rate, the PPE detection pro-
cess is an independent platform along with construction-related
objects to enable the recognition of complicated and elusive spa-
tial relationships. Hence, it is required to find a rapid technique
that is able to deal with videos frame by frame and respond to
the results in real time to track exactly the motion of objects and
impending collisions in live video.
In computer vision, the most popular used algorithm for
detecting objects is a region-based convolutional neural network
(R-CNN) (Girshick 2015). Due to the low speed of the original
R-CNN, the faster variants of it have been proposed including
Mask R-CNN (He et al. 2017) and Faster R-CNN (Ren et al.
2017). However, the above-mentioned algorithms are unable to
handle the detecting tasks of real-time targets from live video
streams. Currently, the top effective detecting techniques for
real-time objects include single shot detector (SSD) (Yi et al.
2019), you only look once (YOLO) (Redmon et al. 2016), region-
based fully convolutional network (R-FCN), and RetinaNet (Lin
et al. 2017). The real-time computing achievement will sacrifice
accuracy. So far, only the YOLO (remarkably, recent variants) is
more quickly and precise compared to other substitutes.
Previous findings showed that YOLO considerably outperforms
the SSD and R-FCN in hardhat detection with a higher frame
rate than those algorithms (Xie et al. 2018).
This study aims to address the task of detecting personal
protective equipment on construction sites. The goal is to
detect the presence of required personal protective equipment
(PPE) on a worker. Because of the multiphase process with
craftwork features, the aforementioned task is difficult. To alle-
viate this issue, the YOLOv5 model is capable of high-speed
automatic feature learning while maintaining detection accuracy
when compared to traditional image processing approaches.
Major contributions are as follows: (1) providing a one-step
solution for automatic identification of the PPE on construction
sites in contrast to widely used multi-phase hardhat wearing
detection methods; (2) introducing four network structures of
new YOLO version named as YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l,
and YOLOv5x for automatic detection of the PPE worn by con-
struction worker; (3) constructing a new PPE detection dataset
with 11978 samples that cover considerable variations. The fol-
lowing section provides related works on safety detection. The
third section explains the developed methodologies. The fourth
section analyzes and discusses the research results, and the final
section draws conclusions.
Related works
Previous studies on the automatic detection of PPE presence can
be classified into two categories: sensor-based and vision-based
detection (Nath et al. 2020). Sensor-based methods consist of
installing a set of sensors and analysing the signals using data
collected from the sensors. These methods focused on remote
tracking systems like wireless local area networks (WLANs) and
radio frequency identification (RFID) (Dong et al. 2015; Zhang
et al. 2019). The RFID labels are stuck on each PPE component.
The scanner at the entrance gates checks the tags to monitor the
presence of wearing proper PPE. Kelm, Laußat (Kelm et al.
2013) proposed a dynamic RFID technique for automated and
rapid detection of the presence of PPE in workers. Dong, He
(Dong et al. 2015) developed real time location system (RTLS)
and virtual construction for automatic detection and assessment
the use of PPEs. Zhang, Yan (Zhang et al. (2019) applied an
internet of things (IoT) technique to detect the hardhat-use sta-
tus via sensors that were tagged into the hardhat. Naticchia,
Vaccarini (Naticchia et al. 2013) used a WLAN to determine the
wearing of PPE on workers and verify if it abides by the regula-
tions. Nevertheless, existing sensor-based methodologies require
manual tags or sensors in the PPE component that need to
install and maintain complex sensor networks. These reasons
lead to an increase the project costs and may prevent practical
implementation.
In contrast to sensor-based detection methods, vision-based
methods have recently garnered considerable interest. These
methods use a standard camera, pattern recognition, and
advanced computer-based techniques to establish a firm basis for
detecting the hardhat wearing. Vision-based techniques were able
to interpret complex construction sites more comprehensively,
precisely, and quickly (Seo et al. 2015). Wu and Zhao (2018)
integrated local binary patterns (LBP), hu moment invariants
(HMI), and color histograms (CH) to establish a hybrid color
descriptor for helmet identification with various colors including
red, yellow, blue, and non-hardhat. Mneymneh, Abbas
(Mneymneh et al. 2019) created an integrated framework to
detect hardhat wearing based on computer vision techniques.
The dataset was captured from recorded videos on the construc-
tion site. Firstly, the standard deviation matrix (SDM) was used
to identify mobile objects, and then the histogram of the ori-
ented gradients (HOG) descriptor is applied for the hardhat
wearing detection.
Examples of video sequences based detection approaches
include faces and facial features detection in color images (Shan
et al. 2011), gradient based image edge detection (Shrestha et al.
2015), and histogram of the oriented gradients descriptor to
monitor the PPE. Additional instances of using HOG based
machine learning based techniques are k-nearest neighbor and
support vector machine algorithms to analyze unsafe behaviors
in construction sites. Generally, these methods used multiple
steps and depend on handmade features to monitor if a worker
is wearing PPE. Therefore, they may face difficulty in detecting
the PPE in the backgrounds of weather changes, various views,
and occlusions.
Deep learning techniques have grown widely in the object
detection area due to their ability to deal with multi-scale fea-
tures of data. Fang, Li (Fang et al. 2018) developed a novel
method based on faster R-CNN to automatically monitor the use
of hardhat in construction sites. A dataset of 81,000 image
frames was used to train and test the proposed model. However,
the model was unable to identify the hardhat colors. Kolar, Chen
(Kolar et al. 2018) proposed a convolutional neural network to

detect safety railing systems. Ding, Fang (Ding et al. 2018) inte-
grated a long short-term memory into a convolution neural net-
work to automatically monitor unsafe acts in the workplace. The
model only focuses on a single device. Therefore, further study is
required to deal with multiple pieces of equipment or workers.
Siddula, Dai (Siddula et al. 2016) integrated a Gaussian mixture
model and CNNs for target detection on a construction site roof-
top. More recently, Nath, Chaspari (Nath et al. 2019) developed
model based CNNs for common construction-related object
detection.
With the sharp growth of deep learning, the series of You
Only Look Once (YOLO) detection methods have gradually
become the mainstream approach for safety detection. Redmon,
Divvala (Redmon et al. 2016) first introduced the one-stage
object detection algorithm YOLO. Boudjit and Ramzan (Boudjit
and Ramzan 2022) presented YOLOv2 based images of drones
for human detection. The methods used the real-time and bene-
fits of YOLOv2 with great precision to reduce computational
time. Deng, Li (Deng et al. 2022b) introduced a lightweight
YOLOv3 to detect helmet wearing. The proposed methods
achieved higher detecting accuracy than YOLOv5l and less com-
puting time than YOLv5m. Wang (Wang et al. 2020) proposed
an improved version of YOLOv3 for real-time helmet wearing
detection with different scenarios of occlusion, tiny objects, and
dense clusters. Zeng, Duan (Zeng et al. 2022) proposed an
improved deep learning method based on YOLOv4 for automat-
ically detecting hardhat wearing. The improved version rose to
4% accuracy compared to the original version. Nain, Sharma
(Nain et al. 2021) examined three deep learning algorithms
including YOLOv4, v5, and YOLACTþþ for hardhat detection
on the construction site. The experimental results showed that
the considered algorithms achieved a high score of precision,
recall, and quick speed. Recently, Zhang, Xiao (Zhang et al.
2022) based the new YOLOv5s algorithm to identify helmet
wearing in practical situations. Sadiq, Masood (Sadiq et al. 2022)
presented robust YOLOv5 for safety helmet detection consider-
ing the noise in the image of input.
According to the aforementioned studies, computer vision-
based data analysis is adequate for monitoring safety behavior.
The majority of investigations concentrate on researching hard-
hat detection rather than PPE. Therefore, this research continues
to employ the newly developed You Only Look Once algorithm
for proactive safety performance control with complete PPE
detection.
Proposal methods
YOLOV5 methodologies
The YOLOv5 structural operation is comparable to its predeces-
sor, YOLOv4. The current version is developed further in
accordance with YOLOv4. According to the network depth and
the feature map width features, YOLOv5 has four variants:
YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l, and YOLOv5x (Dong et al.
2022). Among the four models, YOLOv5s obtained the results
with the highest computing speed, and YOLOv5x achieved the
highest precision in detecting. In general, the structure of the
YOLOv5 network consists of four components: input, backbone,
neck, and prediction. YOLOv5s is selected as the benchmark
algorithm. Figure 1 displays the architectural operation of
YOLOv5s and the description of each part as shown below.
There are three components on the input side: mosaic data
enhancement, adaptive anchor box calculation, and adaptive
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT 1009
image scaling. Mosaic data enhancement combines four images
to improve the dataset’s ability to recognize small targets.
Adaptive image scaling improves the image’s accuracy by impos-
ing minimum black border requirements on original images and
converting irregularly sized images to standard size. The adaptive
anchor box mechanism enhances the anchor box’s value by com-
puting the difference between the prediction frame and the
ground truth and iteratively reversing the network parameters.
The YOLOv5s backbone consists of a focus module, Conv,
C3, spatial pyramid pooling, and additional modules. The focus
component recognizes down sampling while expanding the chan-
nel’s dimension, decreasing the number of floating-point opera-
tions per second, and enhancing speed. The convolution (Conv)
layer is the fundamental unit of YOLOv5s and sequentially per-
forms two-dimensional convolution, regularization, and activa-
tion on the input. The C3 module is composed of numerous
structural modules known as bottleneck residuals. The spatial
pyramid pooling module (He et al. 2014) is a pooling layer that
performs maximum pooling using various sizes of the kernel and
integrates the features via concatenation.
The neck network utilizes the structure of a feature pyramid
network (FPN) and pixel aggregation network (PAN) (Zhu et al.
2022). The FPN transfers potent semantic features from the
high-level feature maps to the low-level feature maps. In add-
ition, the PAN transfers robust localization principles from lower
to higher feature maps. The two structures mutually enhance the
ability to feature a neck network fusion. The head generates a
vector containing the class probability of the target object, the
object score, and the location of the target object’s bound-
ing box.
YOLOv5s Improvement
The YOLOv5 model is the optimal selection for target detection
due to its ability in providing results with high speed and accur-
acy (Qi et al. 2022). YOLOv5 is more efficient in big object
detection. However, it may fail in detecting the background noise
and overlapped small targets (Tan et al. 2021). By enhancing the
model’s scale and loss function, the advanced YOLOv5 model is
proposed in order to improve the personal protective equip-
ment’s detection accuracy and speed with any type of object.
Below is a description of YOLOv5’s enhanced version.
A high-level feature map of the detecting model has a larger
responsive domain, with an emphasis on the demonstration of
abstract semantic information that is suitable for classifying
tasks, but yields low resolution and inadequate localization detail
and information. In signal processing, the depth network layer
typically has a greater loss of information for small objects. A
low-level characteristic map has a small receiver domain and a
high resolution corresponding to the size of small objects. The
low-level characteristic map generates a thorough analysis of the
object’s characteristics and data, which provides more advantages
for extracting the contour, color, and other descriptive features,
as well as regression of the small object’s position. The original
YOLOv5 consists of three scales of image feature detectors. For
instance, if the input image has a size of 640  640, there are
three scale ranges of image features 20  20, 40  40, and
80  80. This indicates that the template is unable to capture
small objects that are lesser than 8  8 pixels. To address this
problem, the advanced version of YOLOv5 will include a detec-
tion scale to the model, 160  160. 640 divided by 160 is four
(4), therefore the improved model is able to detect objects of
4  4 pixels or more that can fulfill the requirements in detecting
1010 N. NGOC-THOAN ET AL.
Figure 1. YOLOv5s structure.
small targets. Figure 2 represents the structure of the improved
model.
Experimental results and discussion
Dataset creation
The dataset of personal protective equipment is primarily col-
lected by internet protocol outdoor cameras at construction sites
and through a web crawler named as Roboflow (https://robo-
flow.com/). This study defines the PPE for construction site
workers including six categories: shoes, suits, marks, gloves, gog-
gles, and hardhat as shown in Figure 3. The Yolo-mark tool
(Alexey 2016) labels each object on images from the collected
dataset. This task marks bounding boxes of objects and generates
annotation files, which include parameters of coordinates and
box size together with the label type. Eleven thousand nine hun-
dred and seventy-eight (11978) valid pictures were collected then
are divided into three main parts: training (6473), validation
(3570), and testing set (1935). Table 1 shows detailed informa-
tion on the data set. Figure 4 plots the distribution of character-
istics of the data set. This study applies a five-fold cross-
validation technique to lower bias compared to random sampling
methods. The model performance is evaluated by average results
obtained by five testing rounds.
Experimental settings and criteria
The performance of considered models is based on the free and
open-source software TensorFlow. The experimental environ-
ment configuration is set as follows: The central processing unit
(CPU) is Intel(R) Core (TM) i7-6820 CPU @ 2.70 GHz. The
graphics processing unit (GPU) is NVIDIA Quadro M1200.
The programming language is Python 3.9.10. The system
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT 1011

Figure 2. Improved YOLOv5s algorithm.

Table 1. Data set detail information.

glove goggles helmet marks shoes suit
Number of 984 1192 283 253 639 18
labels
no_glove no_goggles no_helmet no_mark no_shoes no_suit
Number of 1548 1384 229 640 525 15
labels

where true positive (TP) denotes the correctly detected objects.

False positive (FP) and false negative (FN) indicate the wrongly
and miss detected objects.

Results and comparison

The proposal YOLOv5s is tested with several types of images.
Figure 5 showed the qualitative analysis based on two types of
images (goggles and gloves). It is obvious that the improved ver-
sion has increased detection accuracy by being able to identify
small objects. The proposed model YOLOv5s was evaluated with
different epochs. Table 2 shows the experimental results with
416  416 resolution images and a threshold equal to 0.25. As
displayed in Table 2, the larger number of epochs yields better
detecting outcomes and are able to prevent over-fitting. An
epoch is calculated when we feed all the data in the training set
to the neural network once. When the data set is too large, not
Figure 3. Six categories of personal protective equipment.
all the data can be included for training at a time. Therefore, the
batch concept is used for the data set. Iterations are the number
of batches needed to complete one epoch.
environment is Ubuntu 16.04. The acceleration environment is To verify the generality of the proposed method, three net-
CUDA Toolkit 9.0. work resolutions are used. Figure 6 depicted the relationship
The measurement indicators including precision, recall, and between precision and recall. The tradeoff between precision and
F1-score were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed recall for different thresholds is visualized by the precision-recall
improved YOLOv5s. Precision value is computed as the ratio of curve. This curve is simply a plot with precision values on the
correctly predicted positive examples divided by the total number vertical axis and recall values on the horizontal axis. A high area
of positive examples that were predicted. The Recall is calculated under the curve represents both high recall and high precision.
as the ratio between the total number of true positives divided It is expected in high precision and recall values. However, there
by the total number of true positives and false negatives. The F1- is a trade-off between these two factors. As shown in Figure 6,
score is a combined measurement of precision and recall that the curve of classifying the glove is the best, due to the large
considers their harmonic mean. F1 scores close to one indicate training images. Table 3 exhibited results with different scenes of
high precision in detection objectives. Three indicators can be categories of PPE in evaluation indicators.
formulated as the following equations. The confusion matrix (or error matrix) is one way to sum-
TP marize the performance of a classifier for binary classification
Precision ðPrÞ ¼ (1)
TP þ FP tasks. Figure 7 displayed the confusion matrix outcomes of the
TP proposed model.
Recall ðRcÞ ¼ (2) Figure 8 displays the comparison between the improved
TP þ FN
2  Pr  Rc YOLO5s against four network structures including YOLOv5s,
F1 ¼ (3) YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l, and YOLOv5x for safety detection in dif-
Pr þ R c
ferent scenes. The improved version shows no significant
1012 N. NGOC-THOAN ET AL.

Figure 4. Characteristics of data set.

Figure 5. Visual detection: Left: Original model; Right: proposal model.

Table 2. Detection results for PPE with different epochs. algorithms cannot. In Figure 8(d), the improved version of
Epochs YOLO5s can identify the missing PPE. The detection outcomes
demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method.
Indicators 4 8 16 32
To verify the applicability of the proposed model, the input
Precision 0.8 0.82 0.86 0.93
data is extracted from real video from a construction case. The
Recall 0.85 0.9 0.97 0.99
project name is Paihong industrial factory, which is located in
Bau Bang Industrial Park Extension, Binh Duong Province,
difference in results with benchmarked methods in simple scenes Vietnam. The resulting video clip displays the information of
and large objects. For the fuzzy small objects case, the proposed each worker at the construction site as shown in Figure 9. As
algorithm can detect the PPE with serious occlusion, while other can be seen, the model has identified the protective equipment
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT 1013

including helmets, safety vests, protective shoes, and masks as
well as the faces of workers with relatively high accuracy. The
proposed model is able to provide full information for manage-
ment tasks such as name, status, details of worker, and action
time. For instance, the worker named An who does not wear the
hat hart at 9:15, December 12th 2022. Accordingly, the safety
work can be easily controlled. The manager can introduce rea-
sonable regulations and sanctions to control and improve the
problem of ensuring that all required protective equipment for
labor is met.
The performance of the proposed YOLOv5 is compared to
those of the previous version of YOLO via three indicators: pre-
cision, recall, and F1. The comparing algorithms include
YOLOv4, Faster-RCNN MobilenetV3, and Faster-RCNN
Resnet50. These models have been customized using the same
architecture library as Pytorch to bring back to the same frame
of reference for convenient comparison. Table 4 shows the
experimental results of all considered algorithms. Compared to
the previous version YOLOv4, YOLOv5 was not too outstanding,
but it still showed effectiveness in all indicators. For the two
remaining models, the results showed that the model families
using Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks such as
MobilenetV3 and Resnet50 have not yet been able to occupy the
position of YOLO in general and YOLOv5 in particular in terms
of performance and application level. YOLOv5 outperforms the
other considered algorithms on average, implying that YOLOv5

Table 3. Detection results for PPE with different network resolutions.

Network Frame
resolution rate Indicators Glove Goggles No_glove No_goggles
608608 6Hz FN 0.01 0.11 0.21 0.14
FP 0.06 0.39 0.30 0.40
TP 0.94 0.61 0.70 0.60
Precision 0.97 0.95 0.97 0.96
Recall 0.99 0.98 0.98 0.99
416416 8Hz FN 0.01 0.12 0.22 0.15
FP 0.06 0.37 0.31 0.42
TP 0.93 0.59 0.69 0.58
Precision 0.95 0.93 0.95 0.95
Recall 0.98 0.97 0.96 0.98
320320 10Hz FN 0.05 0.10 0.24 0.17
FP 0.07 0.35 0.34 0.43
TP 0.91 0.56 0.64 0.55
Precision 0.92 0.91 0.91 0.93
Recall 0.93 0.94 0.92 0.95
Figure 6. Precision-Recall curve.

Figure 7. Confusion matrix outcomes.

1014 N. NGOC-THOAN ET AL.
Figure 8. Visual detection of all models.
robustly facilitates the solving of the safety problem in construc-
tion sites.
Discussion
The experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced version
of YOLOv5s outperforms all other detection models in terms of
precision and recall. Following is a summary of additional
findings:
The improved YOLO5s outperforms the benchmarked mod-
els, indicating that including a detection scale in the model is
crucial in building a detection model. The benchmarked models
own three scale ranges of image features while the improved
YOLO5s has four scale ranges.
The improved model is able to detect more small objects.
This will effectively improve the detection accuracy, especially
for detecting objects in an image with large size differences.
In terms of computational process, the improved model
spends more computing time than benchmarked models.
Nevertheless, the sacrifice is reasonable and acceptable regarding
the profits of high predicting accuracy.
The detection accuracy for each category of an object in the
dataset is relatively high. Both values of precision and recall are
above 90%. It is clear that the proposed model has improved
detection accuracy.
The experimental results on a real construction case demon-
strate the feasibility of the model. The model does not need any
handcraft feature selection and has a good capacity for extracting
features in the images. The high precision and recall show the great
performance of the model compared to other considered models.
Therefore, the proposed model created a useful tool for detecting
PPE and enhancing on-site construction safety inspection.
In summary, the above findings adequately explain the suc-
cess of the improved YOLO5s in detecting personal protective

Figure 9. Detecting results from real construction case.
Table 4. Comparisons of different methods for hardhat detection.
Indicators
Methods Precision Recall
YOLOv5 0.74 0.66
YOLOv4 0.73 0.62
Faster-RCNN MobilenetV3 0.59 0.54
Faster-RCNN Resnet50 0.65 0.58
equipment on construction sites. This model is an effective tool
for project managers in safety management with cost-saving.
Implications and practical contributions
The proposed model overcomes existing research in controlling
safety tasks at construction sites efficiently and achieving import-
ant project objectives. Moreover, the research considers the per-
sonal protective equipment of workers with multiple outfits
instead of a single one. On the practical side, the detection
model will support the construction industry by allowing safety
engineers to identify people’s unsafe behavior and enhance con-
struction on-site safety.
The model has practical implications since it does not impose
any limitation on the operating of training and testing tasks. With
minor modification, the model is easy to solve other encountered
problems in the field of the construction industry such as on-site
object recognition, building component searching, interior work
progress monitoring, or structural integrity checking.
Interface
A detection interface was developed to make the proposed algo-
rithm much easier and to provide running clearly and graphic-
ally. Figure 10 demonstrates the main interface of the proposed
detection algorithm. The interface consists of five steps as fol-
lows: The first step requires a user to install the required soft-
ware such as Git, Pip, Pytorch, or Python. The user needs to
search for the database in the second step. The data set can be
extracted from the Roboflow website or self-search and self-label
images. The third step is used for training with required parame-
ters as follows: “Python train.py” for running the training; “img
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT 1015
640” for the size of images; batch for declaring a number of
images in 1 epoch train; “data ppe.yaml” for declaring the col-
F1 score
lected database address; and “weights yolo5x.pt” to decide the
training model. The fourth step is applied for testing with com-
0.70
0.67 mand the “python detect.py” for starting the recognition process.
0.57 The last step is used for generating the output with two types of
0.61 data including image and video.
Conclusions
The works at construction sites are hazardous and risky. Safety
management is necessary to reduce occupational accidents. This
research introduced an improved version of YOLOv5 for detect-
ing personal protective equipment from practical necessity and
emergency needs at construction sites. The automatic tools over-
come the limitations of manual inspection and monitoring meth-
ods and enable data management and recovery.
A large dataset including 11978 samples was utilized to evalu-
ate the comparative effectiveness of the proposed models. The
dataset was collected from real construction sites and through a
Web crawler. Apart from that, this study built an image database
of six categories of common PPE on construction sides. The
comparison results with a five-fold cross-validation technique
revealed that the YOLOv5s was the most effective model with
respect to precision and recall indicators. The improved version
of YOLOv5s yielded results with the highest value of precision
and recall compared to those of benchmarked models.
The detection results on the test dataset and a real construc-
tion case confirmed that the model achieved good performance
with high detection accuracy, low missing rate, and ability to meet
real-time requirements. In summary, the proposed model demon-
strated a significant step forward in assisting site managers to con-
trol safety situations. Despite the current advantages, the model
has poor performance when the objects are not pretty clear, too
small and vague, and the background is too complicated. The
quality of input data is limited in size due to of collecting source.
The application interface is quite basic, not outstanding, and opti-
mized. Further studies should consider the new dataset with dif-
ferent conditions. Integrating the optimization algorithm into the
current model enhances computational speed and reduces plat-
form storage.
1016 N. NGOC-THOAN ET AL.

Figure 10. Detection platform of all models.


Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This research is funded by Vietnam National University HoChiMinh
City (VNU-HCM) under grant number DS2022-20-01.
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