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Feature extraction networks play a crucial role in classification algorithms. However, most convolutional neural networks use the form of residual block stacking to extract downstream features of images, and this simple form is not sufficient to obtain better classification performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a YOLOX detection framework based on an improved ConvNeXt which incorporates many advantages of Swin-Transformer with efficient classification performance. To address the problems of unstable IOU convergence and inaccurate regression coordinates of the algorithm, this paper adopts Manhattan distance as the new penalty term, and the new loss function combines the advantages of Euclidean distance and Manhattan distance, which has no gradient explosion in the early training period and can drop smoothly to a stable point in the late training period. The proposed algorithm is robust to negative effects such as dust, light, shadows, and occlusions, and is well-suited for masked-face detection in industrial and public scenarios. The proposed model is tested on the VOC dataset and the AIZOO open-source masked-face dataset, obtaining 5.58% AP improvement on the VOC dataset and reaching 96.665% AP on the masked-face dataset, which is better than other algorithms. • Designing a deep neural network to use for masked-face detection. • Anchor-free model is used to avoid time-consuming post-processing. • The improved ConvNeXt network improves classification performance. • Adopting Manhattan distance-based localization loss makes training stable. • The Mosaic data augmentation strategy alleviates the overfitting problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]