Artificial Intelligence Based Social Distance Monitoring in Public Areas

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. There are two ways of contamination risk, namely spreading through droplets or aerosol-type spreading into the air with people's speech in crowded environments. The best way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in a crowd public area is to follow social distance rules. Violation of the social distance is a common situation in areas where people frequently visit such as hospitals, schools and shopping centers. In this study, an artificial intelligence -based social distance determination study was developed in order to detect social distance violations in crowded areas. Within the scope of the study, a new dataset was proposed to determine social distance between pedestrians. The YOLOv3 algorithm, which is very successful in object detection, was compared with the SSD-MobileNET, which is considered to be a light weighted model, and the traditionally handcrafted methods Haar-like cascade and HOG methods. Inability to obtain depth information, which is one of the biggest problems encountered in monocular cameras, has been tried to be eliminated by perspective transformation. In this way, the social distance violation detected in specific area is notified by the system to the relevant people with a warning.