Efficient Masked Face Recognition Method during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 is an unparalleled crisis leading to a huge number of casualties and security problems. In order to reduce the spread of coronavirus, people often wear masks to protect themselves. This makes 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 the masked face recognition process. The first step is to discard the masked face region. Next, we apply 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.