The Effect of Wearing a Mask on Face Recognition Performance: an Exploratory Study
This addresses a critical problem for security and identity verification systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing face recognition research.
The study investigated how wearing face masks affects face recognition performance in collaborative environments, finding that masks significantly degrade accuracy across three top-performing systems, with commercial systems showing a 15-20% drop in verification rates.
Face recognition has become essential in our daily lives as a convenient and contactless method of accurate identity verification. Process such as identity verification at automatic border control gates or the secure login to electronic devices are increasingly dependant on such technologies. The recent COVID-19 pandemic have increased the value of hygienic and contactless identity verification. However, the pandemic led to the wide use of face masks, essential to keep the pandemic under control. The effect of wearing a mask on face recognition in a collaborative environment is currently sensitive yet understudied issue. We address that by presenting a specifically collected database containing three session, each with three different capture instructions, to simulate realistic use cases. We further study the effect of masked face probes on the behaviour of three top-performing face recognition systems, two academic solutions and one commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system.