Hybrid Transfer Learning and Broad Learning System for Wearing Mask Detection in the COVID-19 Era

In the era of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), wearing a mask can effectively protect people from infection risk and largely decrease the spread in public places, such as hospitals and airports. This brings a demand for the monitoring instruments that are required to detect people who are wearing masks. However, this is not the objective of existing face detection algorithms. In this article, we propose a two-stage approach to detect wearing masks using hybrid machine learning techniques. The first stage is designed to detect candidate wearing mask regions as many as possible, which is based on the transfer model of Faster_RCNN and InceptionV2 structure, while the second stage is designed to verify the real facial masks using a broad learning system. It is implemented by training a two-class model. Moreover, this article proposes a data set for wearing mask detection (WMD) that includes 7804 realistic images. The data set has 26403 wearing masks and covers multiple scenes, which is available at “https://github.com/BingshuCV/WMD.” Experiments conducted on the data set demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an overall accuracy of 97.32% for simple scene and an overall accuracy of 91.13% for the complex scene, outperforming the compared methods.