Thermal-Mask – A Dataset for Facial Mask Detection and Breathing Rate Measurement

This paper demonstrates the usability of thermal video for facial mask detection and the breathing rate measurement. Due to the lack of available thermal masked face images, we developed a dataset based on the SpeakingFaces set, by generating masks for the unmasked thermal images of faces. We utilize the Cascade R-CNN as the thermal facial mask detector, identifying masked and unmasked faces, and whether the mask colour indicates a inhale or exhale state. The latter is used to calculate the breathing rate. The proposed Cascade R-CNN is a multi-stage object detection architecture composed of detectors trained with increasing Intersection-of-Unions thresholds. In our experiments on the Thermal-Mask dataset, the Cascade R-CNN achieves 99.7% in precision, on average, for the masked face detection, and 91.1% for recall. To validate our approach, we also recorded a small set of videos with masked faces to measure the breathing rate. The accuracy result of 91.95% showed a promising advance in identifying possible breath abnormalities using thermal videos, which may be useful in screening subject for COVID-19 symptoms.