Face Mask Detection Using AI through Python

Abstract

The corona virus COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global health crisis so the effective protection methods is wearing a face mask in public areas according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments across the world to impose lockdown to prevent virus transmissions. Reports indicate that wearing facemasks while at work clearly reduces the risk of transmission. An efficient and economic approach of using AI to create a safe environment in a manufacturing setup. A hybrid model using deep and classical machine learning for face mask detection will be presented. A face mask detection dataset consists of with mask and without mask images, we are going to use OpenCV to do real-time face detection from a live stream via our webcam. We will use the dataset to build a COVID-19 face mask detector with computer vision using Python, OpenCV, and Tensor Flow and Keras. Our goal is to identify whether the person on image/video stream is wearing a face mask or not with the help of computer vision and deep learning. As a surveillance task performer, it can also detect a face along with a mask in motion. The method attains accuracy up to 95.77% and 94.58% respectively on two different datasets. We explore optimized values of parameters using the Sequential Convolutional Neural Network of Deep Learning model to detect the presence of masks correctly without causing over-fitting.