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With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, wearing masks has become a necessity in our daily lives. People are encouraged to wear masks to protect themselves from the outside world and thus from infection with COVID-19. The presence of masks raised serious concerns about the accuracy of existing facial recognition systems since most of the facial features are obscured by the mask. To address these challenges, a new method for masked face recognition is proposed that combines a cropping-based approach (upper half of the face) with an improved VGG-16 architecture. The finest features from the un-occluded facial region are extracted using a transfer learned VGG-16 model (Forehead and eyes). The optimal cropping ratio is investigated to give an enhanced feature representation for recognition. To avoid the overhead of bias, the obtained feature vector is mapped into a lower-dimensional feature representation using a Random Fourier Feature extraction module. Comprehensive experiments on the Georgia Tech Face Dataset, Head Pose Image Dataset, and Face Dataset by Robotics Lab show that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches for masked face recognition.

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