YOLO-V4 Based Real-Time Face Mask Detection via Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

COVID-19, which started in Wuhan city of China's Hubei province and then affected the whole world, continues to spread despite the measures taken. One of the most important of these measures is to use a mask. In some countries, while wearing a mask is mandatory in crowded environments, it is just as difficult to control it. Failure to detect individuals violating the mask causes the virus to spread, resulting in an increase in the number of cases and an increase in the number of deaths. Therefore, detecting the mask and taking action against it is an extremely important issue. In this study, in addition to making mask detection easily and quickly, mask detection is made by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using images taken from different angles and different heights. For mask detection from UAV images, training and validation processes were applied using the YOLO-v4 algorithm on a public dataset containing 1510 masked and unmasked human face images. As a result of the training on this dataset, mean-average precision (mAP) was achieved with a success rate of 92.06%. Then, real-time mask detection was performed on the images taken with the DJI Ryze Tello quadcopter using the trained network. The results showed that the UAV is applicable in crowded environments required for autonomous mask detection and gives successful results.