With the progress of AI (artificial intelligence), more and more people are benefiting from the advantages of AI in daily life. Wearing mask is proven to be an effective means to block virus spread in pandemic control. However, there is still increasing risk of pandemic spread if wearing mask or not is checked only by labour in crowded places. Therefore, it is particularly important to detect mask wearing by AI target recognition technology, and scholars at home and abroad have started related research in this field. In this paper, the author, depending on the quantitative visualized analysis functions of CiteSpace, made a visualized analysis on Chinese and foreign papers related to AI mask wearing detection collected in CNKI and Web of Science databases during 2021-2022, and sorted out the number of Chinese and foreign papers published, research institutions, keyword co-occurrence map, cluster map, and co-author map. This paper studies the application of mask wearing detection by AI target recognition technology in pandemic control, analyzes the differences between Chinese and foreign research, and provides references for scholars engaged in the research on AI target detection so as to promote the development of AI target recognition technology.