A Bangladeshi student cum inventor studying in Turkey has won an international gold medal for inventing an “Automatic Mask Face Detection System”.

Masoom Shah Junaid, a student of Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, won the award in the ICT category at the 32nd International Discovery, Innovation and Technology Competition-(ITEX), reads a press release.

Junaid attended the competition with the exhibition of his innovations along with his guide, Assistant Professor Dr Mohammad Baharul Islam, and associate Arezu Sadegzad at the 32nd edition of ITEX, an international platform for innovators held in Malaysia, last December.

Around 500 international innovations from 72 countries were displayed in the competition in different categories.

The international jury evaluated each innovation based on criterias such as innovation, creativity, effectiveness, utility and application, market and commercial outlook, and environmentally friendly.

With the rise of the global Covid-19 pandemic, face recognition systems gained much attention as contactless identity verification methods. Covering a significant part of the face with a fail mask poses serious challenges to conventional face recognition systems.

Masoom’s major goal with the invention is to develop an automated masked face recognition system based on a deep-learning model and a mask occlusion rejecting technique.