Is Face Recognition with Masks Possible?

With the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks has become extremely important to protect us, and to reduce the spread of the virus. This measure has made many existing face recognition systems ineffective as they were trained to work with unmasked faces. In this paper, several methods have been proposed for masked face recognition. Two pre-trained deep learning architectures (VGG16, and MobileNetV2) and the Histogram of Gradients (HOG) technique were used to extract the relevant features from face images of celebrities. A SoftMax layer and Support Vector Machines (SVM) were used for classification. Five scenarios were devised to assess the different models and approaches. With an accuracy of 96.8%, the best model was obtained with MobileNetV2 with a SoftMax layer on the dataset consisting of a mixture of masked and unmasked images. Three different types of masks were also used in this study. The mean accuracy was 91.35% when the same type of mask is used for training and testing. However, the accuracy dropped by an average of 5.6% when a different type of mask is used for training and testing. A contactless attendance system using the best masked face recognition model has also been implemented.