Detection of Face Mask Wearing for COVID-19 Protection based on Transfer Learning and Classic CNN Model

Abstract

In 2020, COVID-19 swept the world. To prevent the spread of the outbreak, it is crucial to ensure that everyone wears a mask during daily travel and in public places. However, relying on human inspection alone is inevitably negligent and there is a potential risk of cross-contamination between people. Automated detection by means of cameras and artificial intelligence becomes a technical solution. By training convolutional neural networks, image recognition can be implemented and image classification can be performed as a solution to the target mask-wearing detection problem. To this end, in this thesis, three typical convolutional neural network architectures, VGG-16, Inception V3, and DenseNet-121, are used as models based on deep learning to investigate the mask-wearing detection problem by using transfer learning ideas. By building six different models and comparing the performance of different typical network architectures on the same dataset using two transfer learning methods, feature extraction and fine-tuning, we can conclude that DenseNet-121 is the typical architecture with the best performance among the three networks, and fine-tuning has better transfer ability than feature extraction in solving the target mask wearing detection problem.