Robust Real-time Face Tracking for People Wearing Face Masks

Due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (or known as COVID-19), people are advised to wear masks when they stay outdoors in many countries. This could result in difficulty for some public safety surveillance systems involving face detection or tracking. Therefore, the development of face detection and tracking algorithms for people wearing face masks is particularly important. In this paper, a real-time tracking algorithm for people with or without face masks is proposed. This algorithm is trained on public face datasets with faces without masks. Although the training does not involve face images of people wearing face masks, we show that the proposed algorithm is robust as it is able to perform well in face tracking for people wearing face masks. We also discuss the possible scenarios where the algorithm could lose track of the target when experimenting in tracking masked faces. This can motivate future research in this area.