Sumitomo Heavy Industries (SHI) and NEC Corporation (NEC) have announced plans to jointly develop a system that automatically detects and reports near-miss incidents at construction sites.
The collaboration will begin in April 2026 and aims to enhance safety by analysing camera footage and sensor data collected from hydraulic excavators.
The planned system will employ an extraction AI model that analyses video footage alongside operational data from SHI’s hydraulic excavators.
According to SHI, the AI model is trained on hydraulic excavator data accumulated on the SHI Group’s ICT/IoT platform, SHICuTe, to identify risk scenes in recorded footage.
NEC’s proprietary technology will then analyse these risk scenes, integrating video recognition with generative AI to store the information as multimodal data containing temporal and spatial details.
By referencing this analysed data together with SHI’s knowledge of machinery operations and human workflows, the system will cross-check against hazardous and prohibited behaviours defined by past accidents, equipment failures and specific operational requirements.
The process will also incorporate company-specific data. Using these inputs, the system will automatically flag high-risk situations that require reporting and generate near-miss reports with a concise summary of each incident.
A technical proof of concept was conducted in September 2025 ahead of this initiative. During this stage, the team verified whether the system could extract and report near-miss incidents using video footage captured by cameras on hydraulic excavators.
The results showed that it was able to report cases involving potential accident scenarios and their associated circumstances.
In fiscal year 2026, SHI and NEC plan to continue technical development and validation using on-site data and safety management expertise from SHI alongside AI technologies provided by NEC.
They intend to achieve practical implementation in fiscal year 2027.
Plans include expanding the system’s application beyond situations involving contact between workers and machinery.
This expansion aims to address unsafe conditions not immediately obvious to workers and to consider site-specific operational rules.
“SHI and NEC will continue to combine their respective strengths to develop and validate new technologies, contributing to the realisation of safer construction sites,” SHI stated.
