How to Use COVID-19 for Personal Growth
By: Martin Seeler
Tags: Creativity, Self Improvement, Covid 19, Image Classification, Machine Learning

Rise and shine in the time of a global pandemic, using machine learning and creativity.

The COVID-19 pandemic just hit the world. People are asked to stay at home. A lot of individuals have lost their jobs, are unable to work at the moment, or simply don’t know, what to do with their time.

The pandemic is causing people’s everyday lives to change completely. But every individual has a choice: how to handle this situation. It is now the time to shine and to make use of all this involuntary spare time! Increase your skillsets, learn new stuff, read books, get creative and solve everyday problems in new ways. It is not difficult to get started.

Collect ideas

Just look around yourself. It is really that simple. Recognize peoples anger, what they need or what they want. Write everything down. You won’t be able to combine ideas afterwards, if you can’t remember all the little pieces.

When I was shopping for groceries, I recognized some people, arguing about how to wear the mask correct. Collect these little peaces and try to embed them into your knowledge set. How can you apply your skills to solve those kind or problems? Ask yourself, how you can provide value and assistance for those situations?

For me as a developer, I thought about image classification and machine learning. The concept of recognizing different faces in varying positions is something I’ve done multiple times before. Think about use cases for such a classifier. Maybe an app to help people check their mask. Or a camera systems at the entrance of stores (ok, that might be against privacy laws, but cool anyway). It is more important to get going and to improve your skills, instead of waiting for the million dollar idea.

Create a proof of concept

When you shape your idea, it is important to get a feeling about the possibility. Create a proof of concept and evaluate the feasibility of your idea. A good start is by searching the internet. Has someone done something like this before? Maybe there are some discussions, where people have collected and discussed even more points, which are relevant to your idea.

For the mask classifier, there are a lot of tutorials providing information, whether they are wearing a mask or not. My goal was a bit different, though. I was trying to improve the binary classification (mask or no mask) by a third class: individuals wearing a mask, but not in the appropriate way.

To test my idea and create a proof of concept, I used Teachable Machine by Google, an online service by Google to create machine learning models in your browser with just a bunch of clicks for free.

Here are the steps to reproduce the classifier:

Create a new image classification project Add 3 classes: no mask, wrong mask, correct mask For each class, take some samples (around 500–1000) with your webcam Hit the train button and evaluate your results directly via webcam

Evaluate the results

Probability for all three classes; from idiot up to brave citizen.

After about 10–20 minutes, the training has completed and we’re able to view the results live inside of our browser. The accuracy for our model is around 98%, which is not good for a productive version, but more than enough to demonstrate the feasibility for such a classifier. You can even download the trained model files as a Tensorflow model. This makes it possible to use it in Android apps or for further model optimization afterwards. Keep in mind, this model will need a lot more training, especially images from other people, to work in a generic way.