Real-Time Monitoring of COVID-19 SOP in Public Gathering Using Deep Learning Technique

Crowd management has attracted serious attention under the prevailing pandemic conditions of COVID-19, emphasizing that sick persons do not become a source of virus transmission. World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines include maintaining a safe distance and wearing a mask in gatherings as part of standard operating procedures (SOP), considered thus far the most effective preventive measures to protect against COVID-19. Several methods and strategies have been used to construct various face detection and social distance detection models. In this paper, a deep learning model is presented to detect people without masks and those not keeping a safe distance to contain the virus. It also counts individuals who violate the SOP. The proposed model employs the Single Shot Multi-box Detector as a feature extractor, followed by Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) to integrate the extracted features to improve the model's detecting capabilities. The MobilenetV2 architecture as a framework for the classifier makes the model highly light, fast, and computationally efficient, allowing it to be employed in embedded devices to do real-time mask and social distance detection, which is the sole objective of this research. This paper's technique yields an accuracy score of 99% and reduces the loss to 0.04%. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-SPER-14 Full Text: PD