AVS Team Develops Mask Detection System

About a week prior to the start of the Fall 2020 semester, the Autonomous Vehicle Systems (AVS) Lab team had a conversation about repurposing a detection system to identify if someone was wearing a mask. The team wanted a tool that could remind people to mask up on campus. The CIL-Mask Detection System, better known as CMD, was created within only a few hours of the discussion.

Srikanth Vemula, principal researcher for the Computational Intelligence Lab (CIL) of the AVS Laboratory, professor and PhD student, created a trained model that detects if a person is wearing a mask or not and produces a warning sign if a mask is not detected.

The development of the CMD project, which initially started as something fun to explore for the CIL, became an opportunity to help the UIW community. The AVS Laboratory continues in its mission to be an engaged and vested member of the UIW family by helping to tackle the spread of COVID-19.