Indian Masked Faces in the Wild Dataset

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks has become a mandate in public places worldwide. Face masks occlude a significant portion of the facial region. Additionally, people wear different types of masks, from simple ones to ones with graphics and prints. These pose new challenges to face recognition algorithms. Researchers have recently proposed a few masked face datasets for designing algorithms to overcome the challenges of masked face recognition. However, existing datasets lack the cultural diversity and collection in the unrestricted settings. Country like India with attire diversity, people are not limited to wearing traditional masks but also clothing like a thin cotton printed towel (locally called as ``gamcha''), ``stoles'', and ``handkerchiefs'' to cover their faces. In this paper, we present a novel Indian Masked Faces in the Wild (IMFW) dataset which contains images with variations in pose, illumination, resolution, and the variety of masks worn by the subjects. We have also benchmarked the performance of existing face recognition models on the proposed IMFW dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the limitations of existing algorithms in presence of diverse conditions.