Deep Learning Can Protect Outdoor Safe Distance During COVID-19

by Sabbir Ahmed

We are all going through a time that we have never imagined. Those who lost hope in humanity our frontline heroes working around the clock proved them wrong. The scientists, one of the unsung heroes dedicated their life to invent vaccines. This story is from an engineer’s perspective and eagerness to help humanity. As said, “A picture is worth a thousand words” —

Computer Vision is solving medical imaging and diagnostics for years now. Huawei made its diagnostic system to detect COVID-19.

My approach is to calculate the distance between pedestrians from pixels and the person will be detected by an object detector. A demo of the project —

I will demonstrate how simple is the process of estimation. I set up the deep learning based object detector which was trained with R-CNN architecture. Then applied Non-maximum Suppression to stabilize the bounding boxes. Separated the boxes with “person” class and estimated the center of the bounding boxes. I assumed (and that may be solid, you guys will judge) average height of a person as 5 feet and calculated 6 feet accordingly, I know that’s not rocket science but It seems to work well enough. The following system may arise some “False Positive” but that is not a problem cause we want at least 6 feet.

That’s it! We can deploy the system at —

• Hospitals
• Super Shops
• Markets/Bazar
• Roads and Highways
• Garments/Factories

This simple tech with a tracker (ie, MIL or CSRT tracker) and a touch of IoT can manage a large number of people and reduce human intervention significantly.

I live in Bangladesh, where only 15% of people earn more than 6$. We cannot afford lockdown for a long time. We have to explore alternative safer options. But the project can be implemented in every other country who are going to reopen their shops and office. Then again we have to be prepared for a second wave of infection.

This project is dedicated to all the front-line heroes who dedicated their lives to humanity — the doctors, nurses, scientists, and each and every volunteer.

I will end my story with a quote of our prophet Muhammad(PBUH) —

“If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place”

— Sahih Al-Bukhari

Let’s stay home.