Intelligent Real-Time Face-Mask Detection System with Hardware Acceleration for COVID-19 Mitigation

This paper proposes and implements a dedicated hardware accelerated real-time face-mask detection system using deep learning (DL). The proposed face-mask detection model (MaskDetect) was benchmarked on three embedded platforms: Raspberry PI 4B with either Google Coral USB TPU or Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 VPU, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. The MaskDetect was independently quantised and optimised for each hardware accelerated implementation. An ablation study was carried out on the proposed model and its quantised implementations on the embedded hardware configurations above as a comparison to other popular transfer-learning models, such as VGG16, ResNet-50V2, and InceptionV3, which are compatible with these acceleration hardware platforms. The ablation study revealed that MaskDetect achieved excellent average face-mask detection performance with accuracy above 94% across all embedded platforms except for Coral, which achieved an average accuracy of nearly 90%. With respect to detection performance (accuracy), inference speed (frames per second (FPS)), and product cost, the ablation study revealed that implementation on Jetson Nano is the best choice for real-time face-mask detection. It achieved 94.2% detection accuracy and twice greater FPS when compared to its desktop hardware counterpart.