Masked Face Recognition Datasets and Validation

Abstract

In order to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus, almost everyone wears a mask during coronavirus epidemic. This nearly makes conventional facial recognition technology ineffective in many scenarios, such as face authentication, security check, community visit check-in, etc. Therefore, it is very urgent to boost performance of existing face recognition systems on masked faces. Most current advanced face recognition approaches are based on deep learning, which heavily depends on a large number of training samples. However, there are presently no publicly available masked face recognition datasets. To this end, this work proposes three types of masked face datasets, including Masked Face Detection Dataset (MFDD), Real-world Masked Face Recognition Dataset (RMFRD) and Synthetic Masked Face Recognition Dataset (SMFRD). As far as we know, we are the first to publicly release large-scale masked face recognition datasets that can be downloaded for free at: https://github.com/X-zhangyang/Real-World-Masked-Face-Dataset.