A Mask Detection Method for Shoppers Under the Threat of COVID-19 Coronavirus

Object detection, which aims to automatically mark the coordinates of objects of interest in pictures or videos, is an extension of image classification. In recent years, it has been widely used in intelligent traffic management, intelligent monitoring systems, military object detection, and surgical instrument positioning in medical navigation surgery, etc. COVID-19, a novel coronavirus outbreak at the end of 2019, poses a serious threat to public health. Many countries require everyone to wear a mask in public to prevent the spread of coronavirus. To effectively prevent the spread of the coronavirus, we present an object detection method based on single-shot detector (SSD), which focuses on accurate and real-time face masks detection in the supermarket. We make contributions in the following three aspects: 1) presenting a lightweight backbone network for feature extraction, which based on SSD and spatial separable convolution, aiming to improve the detection speed and meet the requirements of real-time detection; 2) proposing a Feature Enhancement Module (FEM) to strengthen the deep features learned from CNN models, aiming to enhance the feature representation of the small objects; 3) constructing COVID-19Mask, a large-scale dataset to detect whether shoppers are wearing masks, by collecting images in two supermarkets. The experiment results illustrate the high detection precision and real-time performance of the proposed algorithm.