MASKED AND UNMASKED FACE RECOGNITION ON UNCONSTRAINED FACIAL IMAGES USING HAND-CRAFTED METHODS

Abstract

In this study, the face recognition task is applied on masked and unmasked faces using hand-crafted methods. Due to COVID-19 and masks, facial identification from unconstrained images became a hot topic. To avoid COVID-19, most people use masks outside. In many cases, typical facial recognition technology is useless. The majority of contemporary advanced face recognition methods are based on deep learning, which primarily relies on a huge number of training examples, however, masked face recognition may be investigated using hand-crafted approaches at a lower computing cost than using deep learning systems. A low-cost system is intended to be constructed for recognizing masked faces and compares its performance to that of face recognition systems that do not use masks. The proposed method fuses hand-crafted methods using feature-level fusion strategy. This study compares the performance of masked and unmasked face recognition systems. The experiments are undertaken on two publicly accessible datasets for masked face recognition: Masked Labeled Faces in the Wild (MLFW) and Cross-Age Labeled Faces in the Wild (CALFW). The best accuracy is achieved as 94.8% on MLFW dataset. The rest of the results on different train and test sets from CALFW and MLFW datasets are encouraging compared to the state-of-the-art models.