Social Distance Monitoring to Enhance the Safety from COVID-19 Infection

The best precaution in the COVID-19 pandemic period is social distancing. Despite being aware of these, people often violate social distance and take down their masks in public places, knowingly or unknowingly. This unawareness is the primary reason for public places like retail shops, bus stops, public transport, educational institutions, hospitals, and clinics to become increasingly inaccessible and COVID-19 hotspots. It would be practically impossible for anyone to make sure everyone is following social distancing in a public place; a human will not be able to see beyond his field of view. An automated CCTV-based real-time system could help in monitoring the crowd. The proposed model takes a video stream as input, segments people using a CNN-object detection algorithm (YOLO), anchors objects' locations, and finds the distance between them. The system then marks bounding boxes around people who do not follow social distancing. Using pixel coordinates of violating people can accurately mark and alert security personnel or display wherever social distancing is violated.