Project
Project
The implementation of the biometric based attendance system constrained by our scope and objectives
was successfully achieved using the waterfall approach through the help of my supervisor and expert
advice. We built a handheld device which was controlled by the ATMega1284p microcontroller, the
program for the microcontroller was written in embedded programming. An Application software (backs
up the attendance in database) which was built using python3 programming language in atom editor using
MySQL as the database management system. It was indeed a challenging project and we believe it will
enhance the education standard of not only Electronics and computer engineering but also at
various Universities for properly maintained and utilized.
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The recent attendance System in institutions has proved to have failed to achieve
its major purpose which was to ensure that the right statistics of students that
attended the class can be taken. The major reason for its failure among its short-
comings is the ability for a student to sign in for another student. Many educational
institutions are trying to identify accurate, safe, and reliable techniques to protect
access rights to their existing services or operation. Finger print based attendance
system is an answer to these concerns.
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consistency over time, finger print has been used for identification for many years,
more recently becoming automated due to advancement in computing capabilities.
The fingerprint system seems to be the most cost effective and easy to use among
all of the biometric system with no health side effects.
The present is the revolutionary time of computer technology. Most of the works
depends on computer application. The traditional student attendance includes all
the hassles of roll calling and very time consuming to the students as well as
teachers for conducting the classes in the department. Due to the process, is very
boring and very time-consuming to the students as well as teachers. So, a new
approach will be needed to handle this process. This motivates us to design a
reliable system for student attendance. The Finger Print Biometric Attendance
Register Systems are widely used for unique identification of humans, like
students, mainly for verification and identification. Also, the use of biometric
features in student attendance management system is a secure approach. A
biometric system can be either an identification system or a verification
(authentication) system. Several biometric features are used for user verification.
These are DNA Matching (Chemical Biometric), Ear(Visual Biometric), Eyes (Iris
Recognition and Retina Recognition), Face Recognition (Visual Biometric),
Fingerprint Recognition (Visual Biometric), Gait (Behavioral Biometric),
Signature Recognition (Visual/Behavioral Biometric), Speech and Speaker
Recognition (Auditory Biometric ), etc. Designing and developing a student
attendance system based on fingerprint recognition manages records for attendance
in the departments Engineering Faculty in Abia State University, Uturu will be
hassles-free, accurate and save valuable time of students as well as teachers for
conducting the classes.
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1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEMS
The rate of challenges at which school administration and lecturers in Abia State
University, Uturu encounter using manual attendance register is worrisome,
consequently making the process very cumbersome. The process is very difficult to
update and, in most cases, keeping the counts is almost impossible.
Abia State University still uses the pen and paper method of taking attendance for
classes. There are a lot of lapses with this method of attendance capturing.
Examples include interference of attendance capturing with lecture time,
inaccurate attendance statistics often caused by filling attendance for an absent
student and unavailability of database for keeping students’ attendance.
The paper method of attendance tends to be a very bad way of attending capturing
as it sometimes results in loss of physical records caused by damages such as
rodent infestations, fire outbreaks, water or even rough-handling. This study
proposes Fingerprint Biometric Attendance and Management Systems to overcome
the stated problems in tertiary institutions.
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To create an advanced biometric machine that can connect to a third-party service
and provide APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to talk to the web
application and database.
To create a web application that can generate full-detailed attendance reports (e.g.
student name, matric number, number of appearances, percentage e.t.c).
To create webpages with React JS and style them using CSS (Cascading Style
Sheets)
To develop a backend with Java Rest Easy aand connect it to the MySQL database
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interprets the finger and display the owner’s data on the screen. This makes the
process an online and real time. Another significance of Biometric Time
Attendance over manual tracking is better security. Since it’s (finger print) not
accessible by any other person or body. It can easily integrate it to payroll systems,
account systems and billing systems. So, in that way it is very flexible and it also
shows that time attendance system can be used for all type of business and
organizations with great flexibility.
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CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2. REVIEW OF RELATED WORKS
There are many of previous researchers who have worked on students’ attendance
system using various biometric technologies such as fingerprint, face and eyes
recognition. However, all these studies are limited to attendance issue and neglect
other benefits such as impersonation, cost, or ease of mobility. Kadry and Smaili in
2010 carried out a wireless attendance management system based on iris
recognition using Daugman’s algorithm. The system uses an off -line iris
recognition management system that can finish all the process including capturing
the image of iris recognition, extracting minutiae, storing and matching. Their
drawback was that it was difficult to lay the transmission lines where topography is
bad [3]. Shoewu, Makanjuola and Olatinwo in 2013 carried out a fingerprint-based
attendance system, using a fingerprint scanner. Although it was relatively cheap
and effective, their main drawback was that they did not consider the error that
might arise in manual calculation. They did not provide a platform to calculate the
overall attendance of the students at the end of a session [4]. Kennedy et al., in
2017 carried out an iris biometric recognition system. The designed graphical user
interphase was used to obtain the students particulars and get the iris image
captured by the scanner. But they failed to consider the cost effectiveness and ease
of mobility, assuming the students were already seated in the lecture hall [5]. Wati
et al in 2018proposed a real-time internet-based attendance system using face
recognition. However, it requires top quality cameras and advanced software to
ensure accuracy and speed. Hence, the overall cost was too high [6]
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for various reasons; the person to be identified is required to be physically present
at the point of identification.
Identification one has to establish a person’s identity (who am I?). Each one of
these approaches has its own complexities and could probably be solved best by
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a certain biometric system.
Perhaps most of the work in biometric identification has gone into the fingerprint.
For general security and computer access control application fingerprints are
gaining popularity. The fingerprint’s stability and uniqueness are well established.
The fingerprint recognition technology was developed for some 12 years before
being matched in 1983 by Identix Inc. The Identix system uses a compact terminal
that incorporates light and Charged Couple Device (CCD) image sensors to take
high-resolution picture of a fingerprint. It is based on 68000 CPU with additional
custom chips, but can also be configured as a peripheral for an IBM PC. It can
operate as a standalone system or as part of a network.
To enroll, a user is assigned a personal identification number and then puts a single
finger on the glass or Plexiglas plate for scanning by a CCD image sensor. The
250-KB image is digitalized and analyzed, and the result is approximately 1-KB
mathematical characterization of the fingerprint. This takes about 30 seconds.
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Identity verifications take less than 1 second. The equipment generally gives the
user three attempts for acceptance or finds rejection. With the first attempt the false
rejection is around 2-3 percent and false acceptance is less than 0.0001 per cent.
Each standalone unit cab stores 48 fingerprint templates which may be expanded to
846 by installing an additional memory package.
Fingerprints have overcome the stigma of their use in law enforcement and
military applications. Finger print recognition is appropriate for many applications
and is familiar idea to most people even if only from crime dramas on television. It
is non-intrusive, user friendly and relatively inexpensive.
Today fingerprint devices are by far the most popular form of biometric security in
use, with a variety of systems on the market intended for general and mass-market
usage.
Long gone are the huge bulky fingerprint scanners; now a fingerprint-scanning
device can be small enough to be incorporated into a laptop for security.
An automated system eliminates the need for paper tracking and instead makes use
of barcode badges, electronic tags, touch screens, magnetic stripe cards or even
biometrics (fingerprints, retinal scans and facial features). This makes life easier
for both the employee and the business as work hours are logged automatically
when the employee enters and leaves the office. This eliminates the possibility of
timesheets getting lost or manipulated. It also saves a lot of time for the payroll
department since automated systems usually have integrated reporting
functionalities which take care of most of the pay processing. Several types of
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automated attendance systems are available, such as, Radio Frequency
Identification Cards Based Attendance System, Barcode Attendance Tracking
System, Smart Card Access Control Attendance Systems, Punch Card Based
Attendance System, Magnetic Stripe Card Based Attendance Systems, Biometric
Attendance System, etc. Biometric time and attendance system has brought more
precise system to measure group or individual’s activities and attendance as well.
This includes the addition of the different options; such as, Fingerprint Based
Attendance System, Retina Based Attendance System and Face Recognition
Attendance Systems. In this project work, fingerprint-based attendance system has
been introduced for automatically monitoring and calculating the student
attendances in a class.
Fingerprints are considered to be the best and fastest method for biometric
identification. They are secure to use, unique for every person and do not change in
one’s life time. A fingerprint recognition system operates either in verification
mode or in identification mode. Automated fingerprint identification is the process
of automatically matching one or many unknown fingerprints against a database of
known and unknown prints. Automated fingerprint verification is a closely related
technique used in applications such as attendance and access control systems. On a
technical level, verification systems verify a claimed identity (a user might claim to
be John by presenting his PIN or ID card and verify his identity using his
fingerprint), whereas identification systems determine identity based solely on
fingerprints.
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fingerprints against candidate fingerprints for authentication purposes. Two
majorly used algorithms are Pattern-based (or image-based) algorithms and
Minutia Feature extraction-based algorithms. Pattern based algorithms compare the
basic fingerprint patterns (arch, whorl, and loop) between a previously stored
template and a candidate fingerprint. Other algorithms use minutiae features on the
finger. The major Minutia features are ridge ending, bifurcation, and short ridge (or
dot). The ridge ending is the point at which a ridge terminates. Bifurcations are
points at which a single ridge splits into two ridges. Short ridges (or dots) are
ridges which are significantly shorter than the average ridge length on the
fingerprint. Minutiae and patterns are very important in the analysis of fingerprints
since no two fingers have been shown to be identical. The Minutia Feature
extraction-based algorithm has been used for matching the fingerprint templates in
this project work. The algorithmic step of the Minutia Feature extraction-based
algorithm is shown in Figure-1.
(Opera min)
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Binarization converts gray scale image into binary image by fixing the threshold
value. The pixel values above and below the threshold are set to 1 and 0
respectively. It’s the most critical task in the fingerprint matching system. The
binarized image is thinned using Block Filter to reduce the thickness of all ridge
lines to a single pixel width to extract minutiae points effectively. Thinning
preserves outermost pixels by placing white pixels at the boundary of the image, as
a result first five and last five rows, first five and last five columns are assigned
value of one. The minutiae location and the minutiae angles are derived after
minutiae extraction. The terminations which lie at the outer boundaries are not
considered as minutiae points and Crossing Number is used to locate the minutiae
points in fingerprint image. Crossing Number is defined as half of the sum of
differences between intensity values of two adjacent pixels. If crossing Number is
1, 2 and 3 or greater than 3 then minutiae points are classified as Termination,
Normal ridge and Bifurcation respectively. To compare the input fingerprint data
with the template data Minutiae matching is used. For efficient matching process,
the extracted data is stored in the matrix format.
During the matching process, each input minutiae point is compared with template
minutiae point. In each case, template and input minutiae are selected as reference
points for their respective data sets. The reference points are used to convert the
remaining data points to polar coordinates. Matching an input image with a stored
template involves computing the differences using distance measures techniques.
The matching score is combined with that obtained from the minutiae-based
method, using some rule of combination. If the matching score is less than a
predefined threshold, the input image is said to have successfully matched with the
template.
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CHAPTER THREE
3.1 MATERIALS
1. PC device
2. Biometric Scanner Module
3. Software interface
Fingerprint
User and Device Finger print Database Processing
interface enrollment
Figure 3.1 Block Diagram of the Biometric Flow and Read Process
METHODOLOGY
The fingerprint is captured using a fingerprint device and then stored into a
previously enrolled database. For attendance, the student places his/ her finger over
the fingerprint device and the student’s matriculation number is sent to the
database as having attended that particular lecture. At the end of the semester,
reports are generated to specify the students that are eligible for exams and
percentage of times the student attended lecture. It consists of two processes
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namely; enrollment and authentication. During enrollment, the fingerprint of the
user is captured and its unique features extracted and stored in a database along
with the user’s identity as a template for the subject. During authentication, the
fingerprint of the user is captured again and the extracted features compared with
the template in the database to determine a match before attendance is made. The
fingerprint-based management system is implemented with Java on NetBeans and
a Java development kit as the backend
This is the interface where the data of the student are typed by the user (register)
and saved on a Micro Soft Access which may include their names, state, age, and
nationality. In order words this interface allows the communication between the
user and the system.
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a. Enrollment: Unlike the identification method, this entails registering the
student’s bio data in a database so his/her fingerprint can be recognized and
verified.
This device collects the student Fingerprint template and matches this template
with the entire stored data for each student and if not verified, the student data is
not among the database.
The fingerprint reader acquires the fingerprint and the PC consists of the window
forms that simulate the attendance application. The functionality of the attendance
management system was broken down into the following blocks. These are: (a).
Administrative interface (b). Attendance system (c). Reports generation
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DATA COLLECTION
The form in the program include: Attendance portal, courses, department, student,
lecturers’ reports. Note: the courses, student, exams and lecturers form are
administrative forms that can only be accessed by the administrator. All the forms
are connected to the database and all transactions carried out on the form are stored
in the database.
3.4 DATABASE
This is where all the student’s data Is been stored using a data sheet in Microsoft
Access office which stores each student data with their respective fingerprint
template on the student’s profile Table, is merged into the complete information
for easy identification when a student thumbprint into the Biometric Scanner.
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3.5 FINGERPRINT PROCESSING
This path is where the programming code is used to grant access before
identification and verification of the students’ data appears on the screen when the
students hand has been scanned by the biometric sensor.
The finger Verification or identification will be done with the Students fingerprint
once the student places his or her hand on the Biometric scanner by reading the
ridge and edge of the students finger and checks if the template from the finger
matches with the template stored in the database before the attendance generation
Now this is where the data and fingerprint of the student that corresponded from
the verification will be granted or given permission to enter or exit the hall in
question.
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module is used as a visual check to authenticate the student’s profile. This is the
User and Device Interface. The database storage path is on Microsoft Access
Office.
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CHAPTER FOUR
4.1 XAMP
In aid to develop our project, the design and construction of a finger print
biometric attendance register, we designed a software interface application
called XAMP. In this application software is where the cache of all data and active
login of students is stored. This application software helps in effective running of
the attendance register in authenticating with the biometric screening module
coupled into external case.
This biometric screening module was constructed using the following materials
USB cord for 5v power supply, fingerprint scanner for registering and
authenticating fingers of students, an SSID Wifi internet for creating wireless
communication and connection between the databases, and case where all the
material is coupled for portability, so when attendance or registration is to be done
in the database, we connect the module to the computer system using the USB
cord, and we switch on the wifi internet link of the computer and search for the
module hotspot (due to SSID configuration of the module) encrypted name
“Judpraise_wifi” and type in the password “Judpriase2347” to the module ( the
connection is done automatically by the Wifi incorporated together to the module,
but it only accepts one hotspot at a time). The Xamp application is shown between.
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Figure 4.1 The procedures for registration / enrollment of students
After a link has been created between the computer and the module using a
hotspot wifi connection, to open the database, we will activate the xamp App by
clicking on the xamp control panel on the desktop background and start the
Apache and MySQL as shown above and then go to a google chrome search web
and input the database web site by typing
(http://Localhost/biometricattendance/index.php)
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Figure 4.2 User Daily Logs
The once this is called up, the administrator of the operator there can now enroll
students into this biometric attendance database by clicking on the manage user
icon. Once the manage user is clicked will open to a page like this below
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Figure 4.3 Registration of Student User Info
And then the operator can start inputting the student data’s following the provided
procedures serially.
The user log is where an administrator will be able to know or access the number
of users that signed in and signed out. Its shows the number of sign in and sign
outs of the registered users serially following with their ID, Name, serial number ie
matriculation number if any), fingerprint Id, date, time in and time out.
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4.4 User Info
The user info gives the total number of users enrolled into the database at the
manage user page, it indicates the time the user log in and logs out after thumbs
printing. Nothing can be added or removed at this page as it only gives history of
all users that attended.
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TABLE 4.1 ATTANDANCE EXPORTED TO EXCEL
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CHAPTER FIVE
5.1 Conclusion
Fingerprint attendance system is elegant and efficient way to monitor the presence
of students in the class over an entire semester for various courses. With the help
of this attendance system every lecturer or administrator can get their attendance of
a particular student for the entire year in a table form within few seconds. Also it is
concluded from the above proposed system that a reliable, secure fast and efficient
system has been developed replacing a manual and un reliable system. Results has
shown that this system can be implemented in academic institutes for better results
regarding the management of attendance, as it has served its minimum requirement
of this project which is:
This system will save time, reduce the amount of work the administration has to
do and will replace the stationary material with electronic apparatus. Hence, a
system with expected results has been developed but there is still some room for
improvement.
5.2 Recommendation
I will like to highly recommend that the school administration Abia State
Polytechnic to install the fingerprint attendance system at each class or department.
This project is limited in the number of student it can contain as at now, so we
recommend that the next section of person improve in this work. There is a zero
probability that a student cannot fake his/her attendance with this technology. The
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students will provide attendance at start of the class and when the class ends. There
would be automatic attendance reports generated and the administration can easily
access them with one click on their computer. I would strongly recommend that the
college installs the fingerprint technology instead of using manual systematic
attendance resister.
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