Constructing a Software Tool for Detecting Face Mask-wearing by Machine Learning

Abstract

       In the pandemic era of COVID19, software engineering and artificial intelligence tools played a major role in monitoring, managing, and predicting the spread of the virus. According to reports released by the World Health Organization, all attempts to prevent any form of infection are highly recommended among people. One side of avoiding infection is requiring people to wear face masks. The problem is that some people do not incline to wear a face mask, and guiding them manually by police is not easy especially in a large or public area to avoid this infection. The purpose of this paper is to construct a software tool called Face Mask Detection (FMD) to detect any face that does not wear a mask in a specific public area by using CCTV (closed-circuit television). The problem also occurs in case the software tool is inaccurate. The technique of this notion is to use large data of face images, some faces are wearing masks, and others are not wearing masks. The methodology is by using machine learning, which is characterized by a HOG (histogram orientation gradient) for extraction of features, then an SVM(support vector machine) for classification, as it can contribute to the literature and enhance mask detection accuracy. Several public datasets for masked and unmasked face images have been used in the experiments. The findings for accuracy are as follows: 97.00%, 100.0%, 97.50%, 95.0% for RWMFD (Real-world Masked Face Dataset)& GENK14k, SMFDB (Simulated Masked Face Recognition Dataset), MFRD (Masked Face Recognition Dataset), and MAFA (MAsked FAces)& GENK14k for databases, respectively. The results are promising as a comparison of this work has been made with the state-of-the-art. The workstation of this research used a webcam programmed by Matlab for real-time testing.