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

Chen, Yuzhen; Hu, Menghan; Hua, Chunjun; Zhai, Guangtao; Zhang, Jian; Li, Qingli; Yang, Simon X.

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. Syndrome coronaviruses 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 don't 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 GLCMs of the face mask's micro-photos. Next, a three-result detection system is accomplished by using KNN algorithm. The results of validation experiments show that our system can reach a precision of 82.87% (standard deviation=8.5%) on the testing dataset. 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.