Face Mask Detection for Preventing the Spread of Covid-19 using Knowledge Distillation

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has unfolded hastily throughout the entire world. This pandemic disease can spread through droplets and can be airborne. Hence, the use of face masks in public places is crucial to stop its spread. The present study aims to develop a system that can identify masked or non-masked faces; whether it is a normal mask, transparent mask, or a face alike mask. The face mask detection system is developed with the help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The model compression technique of Knowledge Distillation has been used to make the machine lesser computation and memory intensive so that it is simple to install the model on a few embedded gadgets and cell computing platforms. Using the model compression technique and GPU systems will help boom the calculation velocity of the model and drop the storage space required for calculations. The experimental outcomes show that the developed detector is capable to classify diverse types of masks. Also, it can classify video images in real-time. Using the Knowledge Distillation on the baseline model can improve the testing accuracy from 88.79% to 90.13%. The proposed unique system can be implemented to assist in the prevention of COVID-19 spread and detect various mask types.