FACE PROCESSING AND RECOGNITION BASED CLASSROOM ATTENDANCE SYSTEM

Educational institutions’ administrators in our country and the whole world are concerned about regularity of student attendance. Student overall academic performance is affected by it. The conventional method of taking attendance by calling names or signing on paper is very time consuming, and hence inefficient. This problem gave birth to research on Radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication with face processing and recognition though in this paper we basically highlighted on the face processing and recognition. The system is made up of a camera which take the photos of individuals and a computer unit which performs face detection (locating faces from the image removing the background information) and face recognition (identifying the persons)  First, face images are acquired using webcam to create the database. Face recognition system will detect the location of face in the image and will extract the features from the detected faces. As a result of feature extraction process, templates or eigenfaces are generated which are reduced set of data that represents the unique features of enrolled user’s face. These templates are stored in database after eigenface calculation. The basis of the eigenfaces calculation in this work is the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The Principal Component Analysis is a method of projection to a subspace and is widely used in pattern recognition. The objectives of PCA are the replacement of correlated vectors of large dimensions with the uncorrelated vectors of smaller dimensions and to calculate a basis for the data set. C# was used for serial communication, the image training, detection and recognition and for the application interfaces, and in connection other physical components. At the end of this research work, we were able to achieve a classroom attendance system that uses the students’ images for authentication and at the same time, it is able to have high level of security and privacy because another student can never take attendance for the other.