Recognition of Human Face Regions under Adverse Conditions—Face Masks and Glasses—In Thermographic Sanitary Barriers through Learning Transfer from an Object Detector

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has detrimentally affected people’s lives and the economies of many countries, causing disruption in the health, education, transport, and other sectors. Several countries have implemented sanitary barriers at airports, bus and train stations, company gates, and other shared spaces to detect patients with viral symptoms in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. As fever is one of the most recurrent disease symptoms, the demand for devices that measure skin (body surface) temperature has increased. The thermal imaging camera, also known as a thermal imager, is one such device used to measure temperature. It employs a technology known as infrared thermography and is a noninvasive, fast, and objective tool. This study employed machine learning transfer using You Only Look Once (YOLO) to detect the hottest temperatures in the regions of interest (ROIs) of the human face in thermographic images, allowing the identification of a febrile state in humans. The algorithms detect areas of interest in the thermographic images, such as the eyes, forehead, and ears, before analyzing the temperatures in these regions. The developed software achieved excellent performance in detecting the established areas of interest, adequately indicating the maximum temperature within each region of interest, and correctly choosing the maximum temperature among them.