A Face Recognition Method Using Deep Learning to Identify Mask and Unmask Objects

At the present, the use of face masks is growing day by day and it is mandated in most places across the world. People are encouraged to cover their faces when in public areas to avoid the spread of infection which can minimize the transmission of Covid-19 by 65 percent (according to the public health officials). So, it is important to detect people not wearing face masks. Additionally, face recognition has been applied to a wide area for security verification purposes since its performance, accuracy, and reliability [15] are better than any other traditional techniques like fingerprints, passwords, PINs, and so on. In recent years, facial recognition is becoming a challenging task because of various occlusions or masks like the existence of sunglasses, scarves, hats, and the use of make-up or disguise ingredients. So, the face recognition accuracy rate is affected by these types of masks. Moreover, the use of face masks has made conventional facial recognition technology ineffective in many scenarios, such as face authentication, security check, tracking school, and unlocking phones and laptops. As a result, we proposed a solution, Masked Facial Recognition (MFR) which can identify masked and unmasked people so individuals wearing a face mask do not need to take it out to authenticate themselves. We used the Deep Learning model, Inception ResNet V1 to train our model. The CASIA dataset [17] is applied for training images and the LFW (Labeled Faces in the Wild) dataset [18] is used for model evaluation purposes. The masked datasets are created using a Computer Vision-based approach (Dlib). We received an accuracy of over 96 percent for our three different trained models. As a result, the purposed work could be utilized effortlessly for both masked and unmasked face recognition and detection systems that are designed for safety and security verification purposes without any challenges.