Face Mask Assistant: Detection of Face Mask Service Stage Based on Mobile Phone

IEEE Sens J. 2021 Feb 22;21(9):11084-11093. doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2021.3061178. eCollection 2021 May 1.

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread all over the world since it broke out massively in December 2019, which has caused a large loss to the whole world. Both the confirmed cases and death cases have reached a relatively frightening number. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of COVID-19, can be transmitted by small respiratory droplets. To curb its spread at the source, wearing masks is a convenient and effective measure. In most cases, people use face masks in a high-frequent but short-time way. Aimed at solving the problem that we do not know which service stage of the mask belongs to, we propose a detection system based on the mobile phone. We first extract four features from the gray level co-occurrence matrixes (GLCMs) of the face mask's micro-photos. Next, a three-result detection system is accomplished by using K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm. The results of validation experiments show that our system can reach an accuracy of 82.87% (measured by macro-measures) on the testing dataset. The precision of Type I 'normal use' and the recall of type III 'not recommended' reach 92.00% and 92.59%. In future work, we plan to expand the detection objects to more mask types. This work demonstrates that the proposed mobile microscope system can be used as an assistant for face mask being used, which may play a positive role in fighting against COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; SARS-CoV-2; image processing; machine learning; textural feature; use time of face mask.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61901172, Grant 61831015, and Grant U1908210; in part by the Shanghai Sailing Program under Grant 19YF1414100; in part by the “Chenguang Program” through the Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission under Grant 19CG27; in part by the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality under Grant 19511120100, Grant 18DZ2270700, and Grant 18DZ2270800; in part by the Foundation of Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, Ministry of Education under Grant AI2019002; and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.