Social Distancing Monitoring and Alerting System using YOLO Deep Learning Algorithm

The Covid-19 disease is caused by the severe acute respiratory (SAR) syndrome coronavirus-2 and becomes the reason for the Global Pandemic since 2019. Until July 2022, the total reported cases were 572 million and reported deaths were 6.38 million around the world. In many countries the infections caused severe damages. It not only took the precious lives but also caused few other national damages like economic crisis. The only solution to stop this pandemic is to increase the vaccination and reducing the spreads. The covid 19 virus is an airborne disease and spread when people breathe virus contaminated air. The WHO and all the nations were insisting to maintain social distance to control the virus spreading. But maintaining the social distance in public places is very hard. In this project we developed a method for detecting social distance. The system uses Raspberry Pi processor to detect the distance between two people from the live video stream. The YOLOv3 technique is used to detect the object from single frame of the video.

I. Introduction

COVID-19 is a life threating respiratory disease caused by a new corona virus which is first encountered at Wuhan, China in December 2019. The major symptom of the disease includes loss of taste & smell, body aches, high fever, cough, and shortness of breath. For some people the infection gives normal flu conditions, and they can recover with two to three weeks but for some people the infection can be severe and caused death [1]. This pandemic has spread to over 188 countries around the world. World Health Organization acknowledged that there have been 571,182,327 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 6,386,234 deaths around the world until 22^nd July, 2022 [2]. The ambiguity and complications of the corona virus have made it difficult to foresee the spread of this pandemic. Since there is no medicine has been invented, prevention is the only way to control the spread of this deadly disease. Self-hygiene should be maintained other than wearing masks and washing hands frequently to reduce the spread. The infected person should be isolated from other to avoid spreading. The self-quarantine helps to stop the chain of spread. To avoid spreading of this virus many nations restricted and even completely stopped the international travel and business. The public places like offices, educational institutes, theaters, malls, swimming pools, parks, and even religious places were closed to minimize the gathering of people. From the analysis it is shown that the lockdowns reduce the spread rate and number of infected cases.