Abstract

Abstract -The paper deals with mask detection in the age of COVID - 19, by proposing a simple and efficient method to detect people not wearing mask. The approach includes a feature extraction step followed by a supervised learning model built with support vector machines. The features are formed of color information by considering red, green and blue channels for an RGB color image. Ratio of color channels is taken into account to discriminate between mask and non mask images. The approach has been tested on a set of 1211 facial images extracted from group of people wearing or not wearing a mask, by considering a 2 - class problem, where the mask class represents the positive examples, where the non-masked faces are negative examples. Part of the image data set is used to train the support vector machines for learning discriminant features for each class, followed by a prediction for each test sample. The image set for the mask class ranges from simple and common one-colored surgical masks to com plex and challenging patterned masks. Cross-validation approach is adopted to test the approach, leading to 97.25 as recognition rate.keywords:-— mask detection, COVID - 19, color information, support vector machines