Masked Face Recognition Dataset and Application

TL;DR

This paper introduces new masked face datasets, including the world's largest real-world masked face dataset, and develops a recognition model achieving 95% accuracy, addressing challenges posed by face masks during COVID-19.

Contribution

It provides three types of masked face datasets and a high-accuracy recognition model, filling a critical gap in face recognition research during the pandemic.

Findings

Developed three masked face datasets, including the largest real-world dataset.

Achieved 95% accuracy with the proposed recognition model.

Datasets are publicly available for research and application development.

Abstract

In order to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus, almost everyone wears a mask during coronavirus epidemic. This almost makes conventional facial recognition technology ineffective in many cases, such as community access control, face access control, facial attendance, facial security checks at train stations, etc. Therefore, it is very urgent to improve the recognition performance of the existing face recognition technology on the masked faces. Most current advanced face recognition approaches are designed based on deep learning, which depend on a large number of face samples. However, at present, there are no publicly available masked face recognition datasets. To this end, this work proposes three types of masked face datasets, including Masked Face Detection Dataset (MFDD), Real-world Masked Face Recognition Dataset (RMFRD) and Simulated Masked Face Recognition Dataset (SMFRD). Among them, to the best of our knowledge, RMFRD is currently theworld's largest real-world masked face dataset. These datasets are freely available to industry and academia, based on which various applications on masked faces can be developed. The multi-granularity masked face recognition model we developed achieves 95% accuracy, exceeding the results reported by the industry. Our datasets are available at: https://github.com/X-zhangyang/Real-World-Masked-Face-Dataset.