Control The COVID-19 Pandemic: Face Mask Detection Using Transfer Learning

Currently, in the face of the health crisis caused by the Coronavirus COVID-19 which has spread throughout the worldwide. The fight against this pandemic has become an unavoidable reality for many countries. It is now a matter involving many areas of research in the use of new information technologies, particularly those related to artificial intelligence. In this paper, we present a novel contribution to help in the fight against this pandemic. It concerns the detection of people wearing masks because they cannot work or move around as usual without protection against COVID-19. However, there are only a few research studies about face mask detection. In this work, we investigated using different deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to extract deep features from images of faces. The extracted features are further processed using various machine learning classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN). Were used and examined all different metrics such as accuracy and precision, to compare all model performances. The best classification rate was getting is 97.1%, which was achieved by combining SVM and the MobileNetV2 model. Despite the small dataset used (1376 images), we have obtained very satisfactory results for the detection of masks on the faces.