An Effective Technique using MobileNet-V2 for Face Mask Detection

Recently, the widespread and extremely fatal disease known as the coronavirus spread throughout the entire world. China's Wuhan city served as its first hub for its spread. The COVID-19 outbreak has briefly disrupted our daily routines by affecting worldwide trade and travel. Precautions include hand washing, using hand sanitizer, keeping a safe distance, and most importantly wearing a mask. However, putting on a mask that prevents to some extent airborne droplet transmission will be helpful as a precautionary measure in this pandemic. In the near future, many public service providers will ask the customers to wear masks correctly to avail of their services. However, ensuring that everyone wears a face mask is a difficult chore. Many techniques such as Machine Learning, Deep learning models like CNN, RNN, MobileNet etc. are available to solve this problem. This paper presents a simplified approach using MobileNet-V2 for Face Mask Detection. The model is developed by utilizing TensorFlow, Keras, OpenCV, and Scikit-Learn. The face mask detection model's objective is to identify people's faces and determine whether they are wearing masks at the time they are recorded in the image. An alert will sound if there is a desecration on the scene or in public areas. The challenge with the model is to detect the face mask during motion of a person. Precision, recall, F1-score, support, and accuracy are used to evaluate the system's performance and show its practical pertinency. The system operates with a 99.9% F1 score. The currently developed model will be used in conjunction with embedded camera infrastructure which may then be used to a variety of verticals, including schools, universities, public spaces, airport terminals/gates, etc.