Automated detection of workers and heavy equipment on construction sites: A convolutional neural network approach.

•An automated computer vision-based method using CNN is developed to detect objects on construction sites.•The improved Faster R-CNN method is proposed, which achieves a good performance on detection of multi-scale objects.•Outperforms comparable results to the current state-of-the-art descriptor methods to detect construction objects on images.•A huge construction object database is established, and the robustness and generalization of CNN are demonstrated.