Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi（德里英德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Delhi（德里内塔吉·苏巴斯理工大学）；Shiv Nadar University, Noida（诺伊达希夫·纳达尔大学）
Wearing masks is a useful protection method against COVID-19, which has caused widespread economic and social impact worldwide. Across the globe, governments have put mandates for the use of face masks, which have received both positive and negative reaction. Online social media provides an exciting platform to study the use of masks and analyze underlying mask-wearing patterns. In this article, we analyze 2.04 million social media images for six US cities. An increase in masks worn in images is seen as the COVID-19 cases rose, particularly when their respective states imposed strict regulations. We also found a decrease in the posting of group pictures as stay-at-home laws were put into place. Furthermore, mask compliance in the Black Lives Matter protest was analyzed, eliciting that 40% of the people in group photos wore masks, and 45% of them wore the masks with a fit score of greater than 80%. We introduce two new datasets, VAriety MAsks - Classification (VAMA-C) and VAriety MAsks - Segmentation (VAMA-S), for mask detection and mask fit analysis tasks, respectively. For the analysis, we create two frameworks, face mask detector (for classifying masked and unmasked faces) and mask fit analyzer (a semantic segmentation based model to calculate a mask-fit score). The face mask detector achieved a classification accuracy of 98%, and the semantic segmentation model for the mask fit analyzer achieved an Intersection Over Union (IOU) score of 98%. We conclude that such a framework can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of such public health strategies using social media platforms in times of pandemic.
Normandie Univ（诺曼底大学）；UNIROUEN（鲁昂大学）；ESIGELEC（高等电子工程工程师学院）；IRSEEM（嵌入式电子系统研究所）；Université de Haute-Alsace（上阿尔萨斯大学）；IRIMAS（伊尔基希-格拉芬斯塔登数学与计算机科学研究所）；Université de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；Univ. Lille（里尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Centrale Lille（里尔中央理工学院）；Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France（上法兰西综合理工大学）；Yncrea Hauts-de-France（上法兰西Yncrea工程学院）
The wearing of the face masks appears as a solution for limiting the spread of COVID-19. In this context, efficient recognition systems are expected for checking that people faces are masked in regulated areas. To perform this task, a large dataset of masked faces is necessary for training deep learning models towards detecting people wearing masks and those not wearing masks. Some large datasets of masked faces are available in the literature. However, at the moment, there are no available large dataset of masked face images that permits to check if detected masked faces are correctly worn or…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to pose a great challenge to the world since its outbreak. To fight against the disease, a series of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are developed and applied to real-world scenarios such as safety monitoring, disease diagnosis, infection risk assessment, lesion segmentation of COVID-19 CT scans,etc. The coronavirus epidemics have forced people wear masks to counteract the transmission of virus, which also brings difficulties to monitor large groups of people wearing masks. In this paper, we primarily focus on the AI techniques of masked fa…
Over the last twenty years, there have seen several outbreaks of different coronavirus diseases across the world. These outbreaks often led to respiratory tract diseases and have proved to be fatal sometimes. Currently, we are facing an elusive health crisis with the emergence of COVID-19 disease of the coronavirus family. One of the modes of transmission of COVID- 19 is airborne transmission. This transmission occurs as humans breathe in the droplets released by an infected person through breathing, speaking, singing, coughing, or sneezing. Hence, public health officials have mandated the use…
University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学）；Faculty of Computer and Information Science（计算机与信息科学学院）
Face recognition has become an essential task in our lives. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic has led to the widespread use of face masks. The effect of wearing face masks is currently an understudied issue. The aim of this paper is to analyze face detection, face landmarking, and face recognition performance with masked face images. HOG and CNN face detectors are used for face detection in combination with 5-point and 68-point face landmark predictors and VGG16 face recognition model is used for face recognition on masked and unmasked images. We found that the performance of face detecti…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Face masks have become one of the main methods for reducing the transmission of COVID-19. This makes face recognition (FR) a challenging task because masks hide several discriminative features of faces. Moreover, face presentation attack detection (PAD) is crucial to ensure the security of FR systems. In contrast to the growing number of masked FR studies, the impact of face masked attacks on PAD has not been explored. Therefore, we present novel attacks with real face masks placed on presentations and attacks with subjects wearing masks to reflect the current real-world situation. Furthermore…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
As more and more people begin to wear masks due to current COVID-19 pandemic, existing face recognition systems may encounter severe performance degradation when recognizing masked faces. To figure out the impact of masks on face recognition model, we build a simple but effective tool to generate masked faces from unmasked faces automatically, and construct a new database called Masked LFW (MLFW) based on Cross-Age LFW (CALFW) database. The mask on the masked face generated by our method has good visual consistency with the original face. Moreover, we collect various mask templates, covering m…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；XForwardAI；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；InsightFace
According to WHO statistics, there are more than 204,617,027 confirmed COVID-19 cases including 4,323,247 deaths worldwide till August 12, 2021. During the coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone wears a facial mask. Traditionally, face recognition approaches process mostly non-occluded faces, which include primary facial features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. Removing the mask for authentication in airports or laboratories will increase the risk of virus infection, posing a huge challenge to current face recognition systems. Due to the sudden outbreak of the epidemic, there are yet no publ…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Face recognition under ideal conditions is now considered a well-solved problem with advances in deep learning. Recognizing faces under occlusion, however, still remains a challenge. Existing techniques often fail to recognize faces with both the mouth and nose covered by a mask, which is now very common under the COVID-19 pandemic. Common approaches to tackle this problem include 1) discarding information from the masked regions during recognition and 2) restoring the masked regions before recognition. Very few works considered the consistency between features extracted from masked faces and …
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Using the face as a biometric identity trait is motivated by the contactless nature of the capture process and the high accuracy of the recognition algorithms. After the current COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask has been imposed in public places to keep the pandemic under control. However, face occlusion due to wearing a mask presents an emerging challenge for face recognition systems. In this paper, we present a solution to improve masked face recognition performance. Specifically, we propose the Embedding Unmasking Model (EUM) operated on top of existing face recognition models. We also…
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（多媒体软件国家工程研究中心）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
In order to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus, almost everyone wears a mask during coronavirus epidemic. This almost makes conventional facial recognition technology ineffective in many cases, such as community access control, face access control, facial attendance, facial security checks at train stations, etc. Therefore, it is very urgent to improve the recognition performance of the existing face recognition technology on the masked faces. Most current advanced face recognition approaches are designed based on deep learning, which depend on a large number of face samples. How…
INESC TEC；Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）；Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所 IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obta…
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks has become a mandate in public places worldwide. Face masks occlude a significant portion of the facial region. Additionally, people wear different types of masks, from simple ones to ones with graphics and prints. These pose new challenges to face recognition algorithms. Researchers have recently proposed a few masked face datasets for designing algorithms to overcome the challenges of masked face recognition. However, existing datasets lack the cultural diversity and collection in the unrestricted settings. Country like India with attire diver…
With the recent world-wide COVID-19 pandemic, using face masks have become an important part of our lives. People are encouraged to cover their faces when in public area to avoid the spread of infection. The use of these face masks has raised a serious question on the accuracy of the facial recognition system used for tracking school/office attendance and to unlock phones. Many organizations use facial recognition as a means of authentication and have already developed the necessary datasets in-house to be able to deploy such a system. Unfortunately, masked faces make it difficult to be detect…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；InsightFace；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
During the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone wears a facial mask, which poses a huge challenge to deep face recognition. In this workshop, we organize Masked Face Recognition (MFR) challenge and focus on bench-marking deep face recognition methods under the existence of facial masks. In the MFR challenge, there are two main tracks: the InsightFace track and the WebFace260M track. For the InsightFace track, we manually collect a large-scale masked face test set with 7K identities. In addition, we also collect a children test set including 14K identities and a multi-racial test set …
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
The emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic poses new challenges for biometrics. Not only are contactless biometric identification options becoming more important, but face recognition has also recently been confronted with the frequent wearing of masks. These masks affect the performance of previous face recognition systems, as they hide important identity information. In this paper, we propose a mask-invariant face recognition solution (MaskInv) that utilizes template-level knowledge distillation within a training paradigm that aims at producing embeddings of masked faces that are similar …
Jawaharlal Nehru University（贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）
Predicting attributes in the landmark free facial images is itself a challenging task which gets further complicated when the face gets occluded due to the usage of masks. Smart access control gates which utilize identity verification or the secure login to personal electronic gadgets may utilize face as a biometric trait. Particularly, the Covid-19 pandemic increasingly validates the essentiality of hygienic and contactless identity verification. In such cases, the usage of masks become more inevitable and performing attribute prediction helps in segregating the target vulnerable groups from …
The performance of face recognition systems can be negatively impacted in the presence of masks and other types of facial coverings that have become prevalent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In such cases, the periocular region of the human face becomes an important biometric cue. In this article, we present a detailed review of periocular biometrics. We first examine the various face and periocular techniques specially designed to recognize humans wearing a face mask. Then, we review different aspects of periocular biometrics: (a) the anatomical cues present in the periocular region useful for …
Social media content routinely incorporates multi-modal design to covey information and shape meanings, and sway interpretations toward desirable implications, but the choices and outcomes of using both texts and visual images have not been sufficiently studied. This work proposes a computational approach to analyze the outcome of persuasive information in multi-modal content, focusing on two aspects, popularity and reliability, in COVID-19-related news articles shared on Twitter. The two aspects are intertwined in the spread of misinformation: for example, an unreliable article that aims to m…
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur（罗摩克里希纳教会寄宿学院，纳伦德拉普尔）
In the last year, the outbreak of COVID-19 has deployed computer vision and machine learning algorithms in various fields to enhance human life interactions. COVID-19 is a highly contaminated disease that affects mainly the respiratory organs of the human body. We must wear a mask in this situation as the virus can be contaminated through the air and a non-masked person can be affected. Our proposal deploys a computer vision and deep learning framework to recognize face masks from images or videos. We have implemented a Boundary dependent face cut recognition algorithm that can cut the face fr…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has increased the focus on hygienic and contactless identity verification methods. However, the pandemic led to the wide use of face masks, essential to keep the pandemic under control. The effect of wearing a mask on face recognition (FR) in a collaborative environment is a currently sensitive yet understudied issue. Recent reports have tackled this by evaluating the masked probe effect on the performance of automatic FR solutions. However, such solutions can fail in certain processes, leading to performing the verification task by a human expert. This work provid…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
Contactless and efficient systems are implemented rapidly to advocate preventive methods in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the positive benefits of such systems, there is potential for exploitation by invading user privacy. In this work, we analyse the privacy invasiveness of face biometric systems by predicting privacy-sensitive soft-biometrics using masked face images. We train and apply a CNN based on the ResNet-50 architecture with 20,003 synthetic masked images and measure the privacy invasiveness. Despite the popular belief of the privacy benefits of wearing a mask amon…
