Face mask detection using transfer learning and OpenCV in live videos

Abstract

In 2019, we have seen the biggest epidemic of the century, which claimed many lives worldwide. The epidemic has in fact changed our life in many ways. It changed the way we interact with people. Wearing a mask is now the new normal. Though now the vaccine for the disease is available, still wearing a mask can save us from Covid19, its variants, and other contagious diseases.Especially at places where the large gathering is expected wearing a mask can be made mandatory and our proposed framework can do its monitoring through CCTV cameras.So in this research, we build a deep learning-based framework to detect whether some person is wearing a mask or not through the live video stream. We used a total of three state-of-the-art transfer learning methods to train our system and used OpenCV to detect faces in the live video stream. We found that efficientnetB1 achieved the highest accuracy of 97.75%.