A midst a time of social distancing, tech renews with its promise of building a safer world. Heat cameras, mask detection mechanisms are not a solution to the COVID pandemic but can help detect areas of risk and mitigate clusters’ growth by adjusting local public policy.

In this article, I outline how to build a system based on a network of IoT devices equipped with camera and face detection AI to identify whether people are wearing their face mask or not within a space and collecting such events.

Demo —mask detection running on the Pi and alerts raised and published to a Kafka topic — Image by Author

The tools used in this project are:

• Python at the edge for the face detection model (TensorFlow).
• The Go programming language for the rest of the code.
• Kafka for asynchronous communication between services.
• Protocol buffers for schema definition and message serialization.
• SQL databases for storage (SQLite at the edge, PostgreSQL in the cloud).

You’ll need a Raspberry Pi 4 with its camera for this project. I also use a Coral USB accelerator for faster inference on the Pi.

#machine-learning #cloud-computing #software-development #diy #tensorflow