Face-mask recognition has arrived—for better or worse
By Wudan Yan
PUBLISHED September 11, 2020
Public shaming over not wearing a face mask started almost as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic itself. In February, some provinces and municipalities in China made it mandatory to wear masks when in public. News reports soon followed of residents and police chastising the non-compliant, a trend that’s now seen globally.
When Akash Takyar heard those early stories trickle out of China, he was shocked at how things were being handled, and he wondered if his software company—LeewayHertz—could offer a more peaceful way. Takyar recognized how important it is to wear a mask to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But rather than leave members of the public to monitor each other, he wanted to develop a computer program that could look at images and detect whether people are wearing masks.
His San Francisco-based company is one of many now pioneering mask recognition as a way to get people to comply for the public good. So far, masks have been confounding traditional facial recognition software—but these new machine learning tools could conceivably be used in private or public spaces to measure compliance and ostensibly take that out of the hands of individuals.
To date, 34 states and the District of Columbia have mask mandates for public spaces, both outdoors and indoors. But compliance can vary depending on a range of factors, from personal politics to an individual’s financial ability to purchase masks. For the most part, people who flout the mandates even if they can afford to follow them get away with that noncompliance. Only a few reports—from Nevada, Louisiana, and Indiana—show that law enforcement has stepped in to arrest people who were indoors in private businesses without a mask.
For businesses that have workers returning to indoor facilities, noncompliance could lead to others in the workplace getting infected. Ultimately, it could be a great loss for a business if there was an outbreak because someone was asymptomatic and failed to wear a mask, says Takyar.
But “face data is as precious as a fingerprint,” says Deborah Raji, a fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University. And those who have had qualms about facial recognition wonder whether mask recognition software, as well intentioned as it may be, should have a place in today’s society.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/face-mask-recognition-has-arrived-for-coronavirus-better-or-worse-cvd/#close