Masked Face Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks in Python

Abstract:

Recognition from faces is a popular and significant technology in recent years. Face alterations and the presence of different masks make it too much challenging. In the real-world, when a person is uncooperative with the systems such as in video surveillance then masking is further common scenarios. For these masks, current face recognition performance degrades. An abundant number of researches work has been performed for recognizing faces under different conditions like changing pose or illumination, degraded images, etc. Still, difficulties created by masks are usually disregarded. The primary concern to this work is about facial masks, and especially to enhance the recognition accuracy of different masked faces. A feasible approach has been proposed that consists of first detecting the facial regions. The occluded face detection problem has been approached using Multi-Task Cascaded Convolutional Neural Network (MTCNN). Then facial features extraction is performed using the Google FaceNet embedding model. And finally, the classification task has been performed by Support Vector Machine (SVM). Experiments signify that this mentioned approach gives a remarkable performance on masked face recognition. Besides, its performance has been also evaluated within excessive facial masks and found attractive outcomes.  Finally, a correlative study also made here for a better understanding.