A Masked Face Classification Benchmark on Low-Resolution Surveillance Images

We propose a novel image dataset focused on tiny faces wearing face masks for mask classification purposes, dubbed Small Face MASK (SF-MASK), composed of a collection made from 20k low-resolution images exported from diverse and heterogeneous datasets, ranging from 7× 7 to 64× 64 pixel resolution. An accurate visualization of this collection, through counting grids, made it possible to highlight gaps in the variety of poses assumed by the heads of the pedestrians. In particular, faces filmed by very high cameras, in which the facial features appear strongly skewed, are absent. To address this structural deficiency, we produced a set of synthetic images which resulted in a satisfactory covering of the intra-class variance. Furthermore, a small subsample of 1701 images contains badly worn face masks, opening to multi-class classification challenges. Experiments on SF-MASK focus on face mask classification using several classifiers. Results show that the richness of SF-MASK (real + synthetic images) leads all of the tested classifiers to perform better than exploiting comparative face mask datasets, on a fixed 1077 images testing set. Dataset and evaluation code are publicly available here: https://github.com/HumaticsLAB/sf-mask.