Masked Face Detection and Recognition Using a Unified Feature Extractor.

The research field of computer vision has recently taken an interest in the active computer vision problem of masked face recognition due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of face masks as a preventative measure against the spread of COVID-19 has presented a new challenge for the technology of face recognition. Masked Face Recognition (MFR) is a specific type of facial occlusion issues that obstruct vital facial features such as the mouth, nose, or chin. The purpose of research on Masked Face Detection and Recognition is to fine-tune a pre-trained model that can more accurately recognize masked faces and detect whether the person is wearing a mask or not, which can be advantageous in various applications, like security and surveillance, healthcare, retail, law enforcement, the workplace, and social media. This paper proposes an approach to enhance the performance of the single neural network architecture as a unified model capable of both detection and recognition of masked face images by achieving 99% and 98% respectively, on the MFR2 dataset. Also, a detection model is proposed that is evaluated on publicly available datasets for the detection of masked faces, which are the MDMFR dataset, the Kaggle face mask detection dataset, and the Facedatahybrid dataset. The findings of this research offer valuable insights into the potential of a pre-trained network with transfer learning to make an efficient masked face detection and recognition system and pave the way for future research in this area.