Face Mask Detection Using Viola-Jones and Cascade Classifier

Abstract

Globally, the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak is causing chaos in human health and therefore, the healthcare sector is in serious disarray. Many precautions have been taken to prevent the spread of this disease, including the usage of masks, which is strongly recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). This research study has used the Viola-Jones algorithm for detecting face masks, where Histogram Equalization, Unsharp Filter and Gamma Correction are used as the preferred image pre-processing techniques to improve the overall accuracy. Haar Feature Selection is applied for creating integral images and AdaBoost training is performed on these images. Cascade classifier, a machine learning-based approach, is also integrated with the base algorithm where a cascade function assists Viola-Jones in accurately detecting objects in images. A total number of 1670 images is used in this work and our system is compared with four other machine learning algorithms, where Viola-Jones outperforms these ML-based classifiers and the overall accuracy obtained is 96%.