Apparently quite a few developers have been working on that. Obviously, Apple did it so that users didn’t have to remove their masks in order to unlock their phones. But software companies like LeewayHertz have taken the idea to another level, creating systems that can identify whether any passersby are wearing a mask.
These systems are different from typical facial recognition systems in that they don’t actually identify people — they’re trained on images that aren’t linked to any identities. They do the same thing as a typical facial recognition system, taking temporary images of the faces that pass by and putting them through a machine learning algorithm. But that algorithm is only trained to identify whether the face is covered by a mask and not the identity of the face.
