Development of low-cost thermal scanner and mask detection for COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 disease spreads rapidly from person to person through airborne transmission. The preventive measures are very important to prevent and control the rapid spread of COVID-19. The effective protection technique is by wearing a face mask in public space. Therefore, this study proposed a face mask detection through Haar Cascade approaches. Besides, body thermal screening features has also been considered in this study to determine whether an individual is healthy or not by using thermal sensor. The pilot study was run for a week in other to test the capabilities and the durability of the program to run in the community. The results from the pilot study showed that the thermal scanner is able to run standalone in the public for a week. In overall, the thermal Scanner device was successfully developed with a combinations of deep learning technique to detect a person with facemask and able to screen a body temperature just by using low-cost components.