Validating the correct wearing of protection mask by taking a selfie: design of a mobile application "CheckYourMask" to limit the spread of COVID-19

Karim Hammoudi (1, 2, 3) , Adnane Cabani (4, 5) , Halim Benhabiles (6, 7, 8) , Mahmoud Melkemi (1, 2, 3)

1 IRIMAS - Institut de Recherche en Informatique Mathématiques Automatique Signal
2 Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) - Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA) Mulhouse - Colmar
3 UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg
4 IRSEEM - Institut de Recherche en Systèmes Electroniques Embarqués
5 UNIROUEN - Université de Rouen Normandie
6 Yncréa Hauts-de-France
7 IEMN - Institut d’Électronique, de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie - UMR 8520
8 BIOMEMS - IEMN - Bio-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems - IEMN

In a context of a virus that is transmissive by sputtering, wearing masks appear necessary to protect the wearer and to limit the propagation of the disease. Currently, we are facing the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease with first symptoms similar to the flu. COVID-19 appeared first in China and very quickly spreads to the rest of the world. The COVID-19 contagiousness is known to be high by comparison with the flu. In this paper, we propose a design of a mobile application for permitting to everyone having a smartphone and being able to take a picture to verify that his/her protection mask is correctly positioned on his/her face. Such application can be particularly useful for people using face protection mask for the first time and notably for children and old people. The designed method exploits Haar-like feature descriptors to detect key features of the face and a decision-making algorithm is applied. Experimental results show the potential of this method in the validation of the correct mask wearing. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the only one that currently proposes a mobile application design "CheckYourMask" for validating the correct wearing of protection mask.

Mots clés: Face protection masks; public health support; health education; COVID-19; coronavirus; e-health; m-health; mobile health; public health system; epidemic prevention and control

Domaines: Imagerie médicale; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]; Biotechnologie

Karim Hammoudi, Adnane Cabani, Halim Benhabiles, Mahmoud Melkemi. Validating the correct wearing of protection mask by taking a selfie: design of a mobile application "CheckYourMask" to limit the spread of COVID-19. 2020. ⟨hal-02614790⟩