Neural networks contribution in face mask detection to reduce the spread of COVID-19

In front of COVID-19 propagation, we can protect our self by taking precautionary measures such as wearing face masks. It may be mandatory in particular public place although some persons ignore this rule. Several research in face mask detection area have emerged and most of studies are based on deep learning. In this paper, we present a method to detect whether person wear a mask or not to prevent the propagation of virus. The approach is based on combination of Pulse Couple Neural Network and Fully Connected Neural Network and the processing is divided in three steps: geometrical, feature extraction and decision. The geometrical module selects the Region of Interest for given image and the feature extraction module composed by Pulse Couple Neural Network extracts all pertinent information which will be used by the last module for decision. This decision module makes directly a decision in case of non-complex classification without neural network training overwise the Fully Connected Neural Network continues the treatment. The input image may be captured from video surveillance sequence, the system triggers a signal alarm once a person doesn't wear face mask. Our proposed approach was tested with different datasets like Kaggle, AIZOO, Moxa3K, Real-World Masked Face Dataset, Medical Masks Dataset, Face Mask Dataset and the accuracy varies from 83.2% to 100% with minimum computation time.