An Automated Real-Time Face Mask Detection System Using Transfer Learning with Faster-RCNN in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Today, due to the pandemic of COVID-19 the entire world is facing a serious health crisis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), people in public places should wear a face mask to control the rapid transmission of COVID-19. The governmental bodies of different countries imposed that wearing a face mask is compulsory in public places. Therefore, it is very difficult to manually monitor people in overcrowded areas. This research focuses on providing a solution to enforce one of the important preventative measures of COVID-19 in public places, by presenting an automated system that automatically localizes masked and unmasked human faces within an image or video of an area which assist in this outbreak of COVID-19. This paper demonstrates a transfer learning approach with the Faster-RCNN model to detect faces that are masked or unmasked. The proposed framework is built by fine-tuning the state-of-the-art deep learning model, Faster-RCNN, and has been validated on a publicly available dataset named Face Mask Dataset (FMD) and achieving the highest average precision (AP) of 81% and highest average Recall (AR) of 84%. This shows the strong robustness and capabilities of the Faster-RCNN model to detect individuals with masked and un-masked faces. Moreover, this work applies to real-time and can be implemented in any public service area.