Evaluating Impact of Wearing Masks in Face Recognition Using Deep Learning Algorithms

Automated and contactless face recognition is a widely used machine learning technology for identifying people which has been applied in scenarios like secure login to electronic devices, automated border control, community surveillance, tracking school attendance. The use of face masks has become essential due to the global spread of COVID-19, raising concerns about the performance of recognition systems. Conventional face recognition technologies were primarily designed to work with unmasked faces, and the widespread use of masked face images significantly degrades their performance. To address this understudied issue, we evaluated the performance of six deep learning models, namely, VGG-16, AlexNet, GoogleNet, LeNet, ResNet-50, and FaceNet on masked and unmasked face images. We aim to find out if deep learning models struggle with masked face recognition and identify the models that mitigate the impact of masked face images. We track, and report miss rates for both masked and unmasked images, along with performance metrics like accuracy and F1 scores in this paper.