Automated Class Attendance Management System using Face Recognition: An Application of Viola-Jones Method

Abstract

Over the past few years, face recognition has been widely used to help human activities in various sectors, including the education sector. By using facial recognition, the class attendance system at universities can be significantly improved. For example, students are no longer asked to sign attendance sheets manually, but attendance can be taken, recorded, and managed automatically through an integrated class attendance management system using facial recognition. The recorded data can then be further analysed to produce useful information for instructors and administrators. In turn, this arrangement will assist them in making decisions about matters relating to student attendance. The main objective of this research is to develop an automatic class attendance management system using facial recognition. In particular, the system we propose was developed using a prototyping software development approach and was modelled using UML version 2.0. As a choice of methods and tools, we used the Viola-Jones method as a face detection algorithm, Python and PHP as programming languages, OpenCV as the computer vision library, and MySQL as the DBMS. The results obtained from a number of black box tests carried out were a fully functional automatic class attendance system prototype using facial recognition.