Deep Covariance Feature and CNN-based End-to-End Masked Face Recognition

With the emergence of the global epidemic of COVID-19, face recognition systems have achieved much attention as contactless identity verification methods. However, covering a considerable part of the face by the mask poses severe challenges for conventional face recognition systems. This paper proposes an automated Masked Face Recognition (MFR) system based on the combination of a mask occlusion discarding technique and a deep-learning model. Initially, a pre-processing step is carried out in which the images pass three filters. Then, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is proposed to extract the features from unoccluded regions of the faces (i.e., eyes and forehead). These feature maps are employed to obtain covariance-based features. Two extra layers, i.e., Bitmap and Eigenvalue, are designed to reduce the dimension and concatenate these covariance feature matrices. The deep covariance features are quantized to codebooks combined based on Bag-of-Features (BoF) paradigm. Finally, a global histogram is created based on these codebooks and utilized for training an SVM classifier. The proposed method is trained and evaluated on Real-World-Masked-Face-Recognition-Dataset (RMFRD) and Simulated-Masked-Face-Recognition-Dataset (SMFRD) achieves an accuracy of 95.07% and 92.32 %, respectively, showing its competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art. Experimental results prove that our system has high robustness against noisy data and illumination variations.