# The Effect of Wearing a Mask on Face Recognition Performance: an Exploratory Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.13521 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13521/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Self-restrained Triplet Loss for Accurate Masked Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01716/) (2021)
- [MFR 2021: Masked Face Recognition Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15288/) (2021)
- [Real Masks and Spoof Faces: On the Masked Face Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01546/) (2021)
- [Boosting Masked Face Recognition with Multi-Task ArcFace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09874/) (2021)
- [FocusFace: Multi-task Contrastive Learning for Masked Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14940/) (2021)
- [Biometrics in the Era of COVID-19: Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09258/) (2021)
- [On the Effect of Selfie Beautification Filters on Face Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08934/) (2021)
- [Partial Attack Supervision and Regional Weighted Inference for Masked Face Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04336/) (2021)
- [Mask-invariant Face Recognition through Template-level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05646/) (2021)
- [Periocular Biometrics and its Relevance to Partially Masked Faces: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15203/) (2022)
- [Masked Face Recognition: Human vs. Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01924/) (2021)
- [Eight Years of Face Recognition Research: Reproducibility, Achievements and Open Issues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04040/) (2022)
- [My Eyes Are Up Here: Promoting Focus on Uncovered Regions in Masked Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00996/) (2021)
- [The Effect of Wearing a Face Mask on Face Image Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11283/) (2021)
- [OCFR 2022: Competition on Occluded Face Recognition From Synthetically Generated Structure-Aware Occlusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02760/) (2022)
- [Unconstrained Face-Mask & Face-Hand Datasets: Building a Computer Vision System to Help Prevent the Transmission of COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08773/) (2021)
- [Longitudinal Analysis of Mask and No-Mask on Child Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00121/) (2021)
- [Selfie Periocular Verification using an Efficient Super-Resolution Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08449/) (2021)
- [Multi-Dataset Benchmarks for Masked Identification using Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05596/) (2021)
- [Indian Masked Faces in the Wild Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09670/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Computer Vision based Human Analysis in the COVID-19 Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03705/) (2022)
- [Does a Face Mask Protect my Privacy?: Deep Learning to Predict Protected Attributes from Masked Face Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07879/) (2021)
- [An Exploratory Study of Masked Face Recognition with Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08549/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Study on Occlusion Invariant Face Recognition under Face Mask Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09089/) (2022)
- [Analysis of face detection, face landmarking, and face recognition performance with masked face images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06478/) (2022)
- [Decoding Emotions: Unveiling Facial Expressions through Acoustic Sensing with Contrastive Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12811/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face recognition has become essential in our daily lives as a convenient and contactless method of accurate identity verification. Process such as identity verification at automatic border control gates or the secure login to electronic devices are increasingly dependant on such technologies. The recent COVID-19 pandemic have increased the value of hygienic and contactless identity verification. However, the pandemic led to the wide use of face masks, essential to keep the pandemic under control. The effect of wearing a mask on face recognition in a collaborative environment is currently sensitive yet understudied issue. We address that by presenting a specifically collected database containing three session, each with three different capture instructions, to simulate realistic use cases. We further study the effect of masked face probes on the behaviour of three top-performing face recognition systems, two academic solutions and one commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system.