EfficientMask-Net for face authentication in the era of COVID-19 pandemic.

Today, we are facing the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, properly wearing face masks has become vital as an effective way to prevent the rapid spread of COVID-19. This research develops an Efficient Mask-Net method for low-power devices, such as mobile and embedding models with low-memory requirements. The method identifies face mask-wearing conditions in two different schemes: I. Correctly Face Mask (CFM), Incorrectly Face Mask (IFM), and Not Face Mask (NFM) wearing; II. Uncovered Chin IFM, Uncovered Nose IFM, and Uncovered Nose and Mouth IFM. The proposed method can also be helpful to unmask the face for face authentication based on unconstrained 2D facial images in the wild. In this study, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were employed as feature extractors. Then, deep features were fed to a recently proposed large margin piecewise linear (LMPL) classifier. In the experimental study, lightweight and very powerful mobile implementation of CNN models were evaluated, where the novel "EffientNetb0" deep feature extractor with LMPL classifier outperformed well-known end-to-end CNN models, as well as conventional image classification methods. It achieved high accuracies of 99.53 and 99.64% in fulfilling the two mentioned tasks, respectively.

A large margin piecewise linear classifier with fusion of deep features in the diagnosis of COVID-19.

The world has experienced epidemics of coronavirus infections several times over the last two decades. Recent studies have shown that using medical imaging techniques can be useful in developing an automatic computer-aided diagnosis system to detect pandemic diseases with high accuracy at an early stage. In this study, a large margin piecewise linear classifier was developed to diagnose COVID-19 compared to a wide range of viral pneumonia, including SARS and MERS, using chest x-ray images. In the proposed method, a preprocessing pipeline was employed. Moreover, deep pre- and post-rectified linear unit (ReLU) features were extracted using the well-known VGG-Net19, which was fine-tuned to optimize transfer learning. Afterward, the canonical correlation analysis was performed for feature fusion, and fused deep features were passed into the LMPL classifier. The introduced method reached the highest performance in comparison with related state-of-the-art methods for two different schemes (normal, COVID-19, and typical viral pneumonia) and (COVID-19, SARS, and MERS pneumonia) with 99.39% and 98.86% classification accuracy, respectively.