A Comparative Analysis of Variant Deep Learning Models for COVID-19 Protective Face Mask Detection

Abstract

The world is in the midst of a paramount pandemic owing to the rapid dissemination of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) brought about by the spread of the virus ‘SARS-CoV-2’. It is mainly transmitted among persons through airborne diffusion of droplets containing the virus produced by an infected person sneezing or coughing without covering their face. The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued numerous guidelines which state that the spread of this disease can be limited by people shielding their faces with protective face masks when in public or in crowded areas. As a precautionary measure, many nations have implemented obligations for face mask usage in public spaces. But manual monitoring of huge crowds in public spaces for face masks is laborious. Hence, this requires the development of an automated face mask detection system using deep learning models and related technologies. The detection system should be viable and deployable in real-time, predicting the result accurately so as to be used by monitoring bodies to ensure that the face mask guidelines are followed by the public thereby preventing the disease transmission. In this paper we aim to perform a comparative analysis of various sophisticated image classifiers based on deep learning, in terms of vital metrics of performance to identify the effective deep learning based model for face mask detection.