Efficient Masked Face Recognition Method during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract The COVID-19 is an unparalleled crisis leading to huge number of casualties and security problems. In order to reduce the spread of coronavirus, people often wear masks to protect themselves. This makes the face recognition a very difficult task since certain parts of the face are hidden. A primary focus of researchers during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is to come up with suggestions to handle this problem through rapid and efficient solutions. In this paper, we propose a reliable method based on discard masked region and deep learning based features in order to address the problem of masked face recognition process. The first step is to discard the masked face region. Next, we apply a pre-trained deep Convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract the best features from the obtained regions (mostly eyes and forehead regions). Finally, the Bag-of-features paradigm is applied on the feature maps of the last convolutional layer in order to quantize them and to get a slight representation comparing to the fully connected layer of classical CNN. Finally, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is applied for the classification process. Experimental results on Real-World-Masked-Face-Dataset show high recognition performance.