ABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is primarily disseminated through physical contact. As a precaution, it is recommended that indoor spaces have a limited number of people and at least one meter apart. This study proposes a real-time method for monitoring physical distancing compliance in indoor spaces using computer vision and deep learning techniques. The proposed method utilizes YOLO (You Only Look Once), a popular convolutional neural network-based object detection model, pre-trained on the Microsoft COCO (Common Objects in Context) dataset to detect persons and estimate their physical distance in real time. The effectiveness of the proposed method was assessed using metrics including accuracy rate, frame per second (FPS), and mean average precision (mAP). The results show that the YOLO v3 model had the most remarkable accuracy (87.07%) and mAP (89.91%). On the other hand, the highest fps rate of up to 18.71 was achieved by the YOLO v5s model. The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed method for effectively monitoring physical distancing compliance in indoor spaces, providing valuable insights for future use in other public health scenarios.
ABSTRACT
As seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most important measures is physical distance in viruses transmitted from person to person. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is mandatory to have a limited number of people in indoor spaces. Depending on the size of the indoors, the number of persons that can fit in that area varies. Then, the size of the indoor area should be measured and the maximum number of people should be calculated accordingly. Computers can be used to ensure the correct application of the capacity rule in indoors monitored by cameras. In this study, a method is proposed to measure the size of a prespecified region in the video and count the people there in real time. According to this method: (1) predetermining the borders of a region on the video, (2) identification and counting of people in this specified region, (3) it is aimed to estimate the size of the specified area and to find the maximum number of people it can take. For this purpose, the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection model was used. In addition, Microsoft COCO dataset pre-trained weights were used to identify and label persons. YOLO models were tested separately in the proposed method and their performances were analyzed. Mean average precision (mAP), frame per second (fps), and accuracy rate metrics were found for the detection of persons in the specified region. While the YOLO v3 model achieved the highest value in accuracy rate and mAP (both 0.50 and 0.75) metrics, the YOLO v5s model achieved the highest fps rate among non-Tiny models.