Contactless and efficient systems are implemented rapidly to advocate preventive methods in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the positive benefits of such systems, there is potential for exploitation by invading user privacy. In this work, we analyse the privacy invasiveness of face biometric systems by predicting privacy-sensitive soft-biometrics using masked face images. We train and apply a CNN based on the ResNet-50 architecture with 20,003 synthetic masked images and measure the privacy invasiveness. Despite the popular belief of the privacy benefits of wearing a mask among people, we show that there is no significant difference to privacy invasiveness when a mask is worn. In our experiments we were able to accurately predict sex (94.7%),race (83.1%) and age (MAE 6.21 and RMSE 8.33) from masked face images. Our proposed approach can serve as a baseline utility to evaluate the privacy-invasiveness of artificial intelligence systems that make use of privacy-sensitive information. We open-source all contributions for re-producibility and broader use by the research community. 

/pdf/does-a-face-mask-protect-my-privacy-deep-learning-to-predict-2k1dlpz1.pdf

Does a Face Mask Protect My Privacy?: Deep Learning to Predict Protected Attributes from Masked Face Images

/pdf/contrastive-representation-learning-for-natural-world-3inlmhrq53.pdf

Contrastive Representation Learning for Natural World Imagery: Habitat prediction for 30, 000 species.

Facial age estimation is one of the most important tasks in the field of face recognition and recommendation system. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been required to wear masks, which can be a challenge for traditional recognition methods. In this paper, an improved convolutional neural network architecture based on MobileNet is proposed to perform age estimation. For the challenge of masked faces, an innovative mask generation method using face keypoint detection is adopted, extracting the key points of the faces in order to add synthetic masks to simulate the real situations. Then we compare the estimation results of the original images and the synthetic images. Our method is applied to the WIKI Face dataset containing more than 150,000 images, and achieves MAE of 3.79 and 6.54 on unmasked and masked faces, respectively, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. 

Age Estimation with Synthetic Mask Generation Based on MobileNet and Facial Keypoint Detection

Automated face recognition is a widely adopted machine learning technology for contactless identification of people in various processes such as automated border control, secure login to electronic devices, community surveillance, tracking school attendance, workplace clock in and clock out. Using face masks have become crucial in our daily life with the recent world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. The use of face masks causes the performance of conventional face recognition technologies to degrade considerably. The effect of mask-wearing in face recognition is yet an understudied issue. In this paper, we address this issue by evaluating the performance of a number of face recognition models which are tested by identifying masked and unmasked face images. We use six conventional machine learning algorithms, which are SVC, KNN, LDA, DT, LR and NB, to find out the ones which perform best, besides the ones which poorly perform, in the presence of masked face images. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is utilized as the feature extraction operator. We generated and used synthesized masked face images. We prepared unmasked, masked, and half-masked training datasets and evaluated the face recognition performance against both masked and unmasked images to present a broad view of this crucial problem. We believe that our study is unique in elaborating the mask-aware facial recognition with almost all possible scenarios including half_masked-to-masked and half_masked-to-unmasked besides evaluating a larger number of conventional machine learning algorithms compared the other studies in the literature. 

/pdf/an-exploratory-study-of-masked-face-recognition-with-machine-26j1gg3p.pdf

An Exploratory Study of Masked Face Recognition with Machine Learning Algorithms

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed accepted norms globally. Within the past year, masks have been used as a public health response to limit the spread of the virus. This sudden change has rendered many face recognition based access control, authentication and surveillance systems ineffective. Official documents such as passports, driving license and national identity cards are enrolled with fully uncovered face images. However, in the current global situation, face matching systems should be able to match these reference images with masked face images. As an example, in an airport or security checkpoint it is safer to match the unmasked image of the identifying document to the masked person rather than asking them to remove the mask. We find that current facial recognition techniques are not robust to this form of occlusion. 
To address this unique requirement presented due to the current circumstance, we propose a set of re-purposed datasets and a benchmark for researchers to use. We also propose a contrastive visual representation learning based pre-training workflow which is specialized to masked vs unmasked face matching. We ensure that our method learns robust features to differentiate people across varying data collection scenarios. We achieve this by training over many different datasets and validating our result by testing on various holdout datasets. The specialized weights trained by our method outperform standard face recognition features for masked to unmasked face matching. We believe the provided synthetic mask generating code, our novel training approach and the trained weights from the masked face models will help in adopting existing face recognition systems to operate in the current global environment. We open-source all contributions for broader use by the research community.

Nuran Kasthuriaarachchi

Papers

Multi-Dataset Benchmarks for Masked Identification using Contrastive Representation Learning