Efficacy Determination of Various Base Networks in Single Shot Detector for Automatic Mask Localisation in a Post COVID Setup

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the rarest events of global crises where a viral pathogen infiltrates every part of the world, leaving every country face an inevitable threat of having to lock down major cities and economic hubs and put firm restrictions on citizens thus slowing down the economy. The risk of removal of lockdowns is the emergence of new waves of a pandemic causing a surge in new cases. These facts necessitate the containment of the virus when the lockdowns end. Wearing masks in crowded places can help restrict the spread of the virus through minuscule droplets in the air. Through the automatic detection, enumeration, and localisation of masks from closed-circuit television footage, it is possible to keep violations of post-COVID regulations in check. In this paper, we leverage the Single-Shot Detection (SSD) framework through different base convolutional neural networks (CNNs) namely VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and Xception to compare performance metrics attained by the different variations of the SSD and determine the efficacies for the best base network model for automatic mask detection in a post COVID world. We find that Xception performs best among all the other models in terms of mean average precision.