Proposed approach to improve facial recognition techniques for occluded faces by Covid-19 mask protection

Wearing protective masks has become commonplace in several countries as a result of the epidemic connected to the Covid-19 virus. Wearing a mask obscures a considerable part of the face, making some facial recognition techniques difficult to complete and obstructing the operation of various identifying systems, such as access control systems. In this paper, we offer an original approach that allows many face recognition systems to continue to identify persons even when wearing protective masks. The proposed approach is mainly based on the prior use of skin detection techniques. We validated our method using the Eigenfaces method by the FEI database, which we supplemented with faces wearing protective masks. The evaluation results of our approach are very satisfactory.