Multi-angle Head Pose Classification when Wearing the Mask for Face Recognition under the COVID-19 Coronavirus Epidemic

Head pose classification is widely used for the preprocessing before face recognition and multi-angle problems, because algorithms such as face recognition often require the input image to be a front face. But affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, people wear face masks to protect themselves safe, which makes cover most areas of the face. This makes some common algorithms cannot be applied to head pose classification in the new situation. Therefore, this paper established a method HGL to deal with the head pose classification by adopting color texture analysis of images and line portrait. The proposed HGL method combines the H-channel of the HSV color space with the face portrait and grayscale image, and train the CNN to extract features for classification. The evaluation on MAFA dataset shows that compared with the algorithms based on facial landmark detection and convolutional neural network, the proposed method has achieved a better performance (Front accuracy: 93.64%, Side accuracy: 87.17^%).