Design of intelligent embedded system for personal protective equipment detection and face recognition access control

Abstract

This paper presents an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automated access control system that aims to reduce delays and improve safety. The primary problem addressed is effective monitoring of compliance with personal protective equipment (PPE) and secure access control for personnel entering sites. This study represents the design and development of an access control system that includes accurate detection of essential PPE items (e.g., safety helmets, gloves, goggles, and gas detectors), integration of facial recognition for identity verification, real-time monitoring of video feeds, and an intuitive user interface for security personnel to manage access and compliance efficiently. The software part uses you only look once (YOLO) version 8 for real-time object detection, classification, and drawing the bounding boxes around the detected object in a single forward pass. The hardware platform consists of NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB as an edge computing device. The developed AI-based embedded system is tested and validated with real-world scenarios and achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 98.4% for PPE detection and 99.38% accuracy for face recognition.