Los Altos, CA, October 19, 2020: Wearing a face mask can help decrease the spread of COVID-19 and other airborne viruses. The state-of-the-art face detection and recognition capabilities built into piXserve have now been extended to address the presence of COVID-style face masks.
From a face detection and recognition perspective, masks present a significant technical challenge as they they tend to obstruct much of the visible face. Many software systems are unable to deal with this and people wearing masks are more often than not undetected. In addition, when the face is detected, measurements used to compare faces go awry due to the high level of noise presented by the mask.
The latest version of piXserve now includes the abiltiy to detect both masked and unmasked faces. It is able to accomplish this with a high degree of reliability and accuracy. Further, the software now also enables face recognition with or without a mask.
Distinguishing whether a person is wearing a face mask or not, can be helpful in a number of use cases. For instance, demonstrating compliance to federal, state, local, and corporate policies that require people to wear masks can now be accomplished automatically with piXserve. Simply point piXserve to your existing video camera feeds. Masked and unmasked faces are detected and reports can be generated showing counts for each camera over time. The data can be evaluated to garner statistics and show which areas of your building or facility are compliant with your rules, and which are not and when. The data can also be used to help set up corrective actions and structure training programs. As your organization plans a post-COVID return to work, piXserve can help you make your workplace safer and demonstrably so.
With respect to face recognition, a piXserve user can now use the image of a person wearing a mask or other facial covering, and search to identify matches to that same person not wearing a mask. A user can also do the opposite: use the image of a person not wearing a mask to identify candidate matches where they are wearing masks. As one would reasonably expect, there is a small loss in accuracy relative to the unmasked-to-unmasked search case, but overall the capability is still excellent and generates very useful leads that can help reduce the work that an analyst or investigator needs to to.
These capabilities are now standard in all editions of piXserve. There are no additional licensing costs associated with these enhancements. Please contact piXlogic Technical Support to ensure that the version you are running, whether on-prem or on the cloud is up-to-date. To learn more about piXserve and how it can help your organization, please contact piXlogic