Mask Covered Face Recognition Using Haar Cascade Classifier and Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

Right from the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, everyone is aware of the havoc caused by the pandemic. To curb its spread, every healthcare agency and civic body around the globe has been advising to wear masks. However, this necessary practice has posed a significant challenge for the modern-day Facial Recognition technology. Face recognition finds significant application in the security domain that demands speed and accuracy both simultaneously. This requires the system to be highly optimized and efficient. Through this paper, we present a novel approach using Haar cascade classifier for face detection with Local Binary Patterns Histograms (LBPH) face recognizer. This work further goes on to address the various problems that occur when the user wears a mask that covers a different area and percentage coverage of the face resulting in inaccuracies as various tests come with false negatives or false positives. This problem is addressed by making use of a fuzzybased system that decides the “threshold confidence score” needed to pass the authentication dynamically. Our proposed model for masked Face recognition achieves an accuracy of 86% when a Haar-feature-based cascade classifier with LBPH face recognizer is used standalone which further improves to around 97% when used in conjunction with a fuzzy system