Face mask detection in street camera video streams using AI: behind the curtain

This blog post has been written with the collaboration of Marcos Toscano. In the new world of coronavirus, multidisciplinary efforts have been organized to slow the spread of the pandemic. The AI community has also been a part of these endeavors. In particular, developments for monitoring social distancing or identifying face masks have made-the-headlines. But all this hype and anxiety to show off results as fast as possible, added up to the usual AI overpromising factor (see AI winter), may be signaling the wrong idea that solving some of these use cases is almost trivial due to the mighty powers of AI. Without further ado, let's see some results so you can grasp an idea about what we're trying to solve here. These are compilations of many results from different cameras in short fragments, but there's also a complete 20 minutes video example at the end of this blog post. Note: the numbers above people are "votes" from a mask classifier: they should be positive when the person has a mask, negative if not, and 0 if undecided.