Masked facial recognition using ensemble convolutional neural network and grey-level co-occurrence matrix

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic proved how face masks became necessary to stop the spread of infection. Due to this, effective identification of people wearing face mask became challenging. Masked facial recognition has significantly increased in accuracy because of developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Small size of the dataset of masked facial images has been a problem in earlier research. As would be expected, this results in poorer accuracy when the model tries to identify faces. In this study, a novel model is proposed with textural feature extraction using grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and an ensemble of two pre-trained CNNs DenseNet-121 and VGG-16. Using the minimum redundancy and maximum relevance, the model has improved accuracy by choosing the most important features of the image. The model was trained using in-house dataset that included 38,290 photos of 2,500 people with approximately equal distribution of properly masked, partially masked, and unmasked images. In this, we evaluated the performance of the model on different classifiers multi-class logistic regression (LR) and support vector machine (SVM) with one-vs-rest (OvR) classification and artificial neural network (ANN) and applied a soft voting scheme. The model achieved the highest accuracy of 98.56% at a learning rate of 0.001 on the ANN classifier.