10 11648 J Ajesa 20180601 11 PDF
10 11648 J Ajesa 20180601 11 PDF
10 11648 J Ajesa 20180601 11 PDF
Email address:
[email protected] (B. O. Oyebola)
Received: December 19, 2017; Accepted: December 29, 2017; Published: January 17, 2018
Abstract: Today many educational institutions use the manual system of taking attendance in which student writes their
names and matric numbers on a sheet of paper or in an attendance sheet. To eradicate the problem associated with the manual
attendance system such as student not coming to class, writing of names for students who are not present, an automated
approach is implemented through biometric technology embedded with a window application which is fully explained in this
work. This paper presents design and construction of student attendance management system. The developed system comprises
of a timekeeping system that will register every student in a database. The database itself will be managed by the department,
so that reports, either individual or collective, can be issued whenever they are needed on both physical and electronic format.
Also, these reports would be used to create statistics and further help the growth of the academic process.
1. Introduction
Fingerprints are considered to be the best and fastest student’s attendance or presence in an academic institution.
method for biometric identification. They are secured to use, Student’s attendance control system has manually been
unique for every person and do not change in one's lifetime. approached using time clocks and timesheets, but student
Besides these, implementation of fingerprint recognition attendance management goes beyond this to provide a
system is cheap, easy, accurate and satisfactory [1]. studying environment which maximizes and motivates
Fingerprint recognition has been widely used in both forensic student’s attendance [4]. Every organization, whether it be an
and civilian applications. Compared with other biometrics educational institution or business organization, has to
features, fingerprint-based biometrics is the most proven maintain a proper record of attendance of students or
technique and has the largest market shares [2]. Not only it is employees for effective functioning of the organization [5].
faster than other techniques but also the energy consumption The process of monitoring attendances in any institution is an
by such systems is less. When human fingerprint experts important part in determining the efficiency of the services
determine if two fingerprints are from the same finger, the offered by the institution and the general interest of those
matching degree between two minutiae pattern is one of the who benefit from the institution’s services, in our case, the
most important factors. Thanks to the similarity to the way of students [6]. This system developed will reduce the manual
human fingerprint experts and compactness of templates, the work and avoid redundant data. By maintaining the
minutiae-based matching method is the most widely studied attendance manually, efficient reports cannot be generated.
matching method [3]. Today many Smartphone such as The system can generate efficient weekly, consolidate report
iPhone, Infinix, Techno, and many notebook personal based on the attendance [7]. As the attendances are
computer use fingerprint technology for authentication to log maintained in registers it has been a tough task for admin and
in to the phone and the computer system. staff to maintain for long time. Instead the software can keep
Student attendance management is the act of managing long and retrieve the information when needed [7]. Student
2 Blessed Olalekan Oyebola et al.: Fingerprint for Personal Identification: A Developed System for Students
Attendance Information Management
academic attendance is very important since it will affect the card reader. The student is granted and/or denies specific
students from gaining knowledge and skills as well as their lecture attendance based on the result of the comparison by
grades [8]. The main purpose of carrying out this work is to the backend software system running on the PC to which the
develop a hybrid student attendance system for which card reader is serially interfaced. The system though
desktop-based application is developed to obtain the provided a simplified, low cost embedded computer based
attendance of student by fingerprint and post/review the system solution to the management of lecture attendance
attendance results using a the window application [8]. The problem in developing countries but does not eliminate the
proposed system has been developed to overcome the risk of impersonation” [11].
drawbacks of the existing system - aiming to reduce the
paper work and saving time to generate accurate results from
the student’s attendance. The system provides user interface. 2. Types of Attendance Management
The efficient reports and statistics of student details can be System
generated by using this proposed system. The most important
part of this work is a database containing all the information Attendance Management is divided into two categories
about students, department and attendance percentage which namely; Conventional and Automated methods.
can serve as criteria for examination pass. Conventional methods include time sheet, attendance register
When the first employee time clock was invented in the and time clock [12]. “Time sheets are documents, electronic
late 1800s, its purpose was to record the time an employee or otherwise that record what time was spent by the
entered and left the factory [9]. “This mechanical employee employee on what tasks. Attendance register is an official list
time clock would stamp day and time information on a thick of people who are present at an institution or organization.
paper card, hence the name 'time card'. This first time card Time clock which is a mechanical (or electronic) time piece
gave the factory owner an actual record of the hours worked used to assist in tracking the hour worked by an employee of
by each employee. This protected the business owner by a company. Automated methods include Barcode system
making sure employees worked the number of hours they attendance system, magnetic stripe attendance system, Radio
claimed, and protected employees by making it much more Frequency Identification (RFID) and the biometric
difficult for employers to cheat them out of their wages. Time attendance system” [12]. The barcode attendance system
and attendance systems continued to advance with smaller requires that every employee is issued a badge/card in which
electrical time clocks eventually replacing the large there is a barcode [4]. “In order to check into or out of the
mechanical ones. Time cards also evolved to have special company, the badge/card is swapped on the time clock, and
areas marked on them for clocking in and out, so workers had the data is captured by the clock. In the magnetic stripe
to carefully line up the time card in just the right place. When attendance system, data is encoded in the magnetic stripe of
commercial time clock software first made its appearance in the employee card. When the card, is swiped through the
the 1990s, businesses started moving away from mechanical employee time clock, the information in the card’s magnetic
and electrical time clocks that were subject to failure and stripe is recorded by the time clock. This system reads one
expensive to replace or repair. Time clock software allowed card at a time and also requires contact with the reader.
business owners to enjoy the benefits of reduced payroll Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that
processing costs by making it quick and easy to go directly uses radio waves to transfer data from an electronic tag,
from time clock to paycheck with increased efficiency while called RFID tag or label, attached to an object, through a
eliminating buddy punching” [9]. reader for the purpose of identifying and tracking the object.
One of the existing systems is manual entry of student’s The ID cards of the employees is embedded with RFID tag
name in the attendance sheet. Here the attendance will be which is read by a reader. This RFID system is interfaced to a
carried out in the hand written registers. The human effort is database through a computer. Each employee uses an RFID
more here as the retrieval of the information is not as easy as card and the reader records the data when the employee
the records are maintained in the hand written registers [7]. enters or exits. In biometric Attendance system, there is
An embedded computer based lecture attendance attendance software that is paired with a time clock for
management system was proposed. The system provides an employees which uses biometric technology for
improvised electronic card and card reader serially interfaced authentication purposes. When these systems are in use, the
to the digital computer system [10]. Proposed, also, is an employees can use their biometric data such as finger prints
embedded computer-based lecture attendance management for clocking in and clocking out. This method has the great
system where a single-chip computer based subsystems (an benefit that the entire process is easy as well as quick. Other
improvised electronic card and the card reader) were advantages include elimination of the cost previously
interfaced serially to the serial port of the digital computer incurred in getting the employees cards” [4].
[11]. “The electronic card is a model of a smart card A fingerprint is the pattern of ridges and valleys on the
containing the student identity (ID-Name, Matriculation surface of a fingertip [5]. “The endpoints and crossing points
Number and five pin encrypted code). The student ID is of ridges are called minutiae. It is a widely accepted
authenticated by the card reader which compares the entrance assumption that the minutiae pattern of each finger is unique
code with the encrypted code on the card swiped through the and does not change during one's life. Ridge endings are the
= American Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications 2018; 6(1): 1-10 3
points where the ridge curve terminates, and bifurcations are The details will be stored in an Excel format (.xlsx) which
where a ridge splits from a single path to two paths at a Y- can also be printed. The computer system in this work serves
junction” [5]. Figure 1a and 1b illustrates an example of a as a database to the RFID system, because when the window
ridge ending and a bifurcation. In this example, the black application is launched later even if the SD card is not
pixels correspond to the ridges, and the white pixels connected to the system, it will still show the student details
correspond to the n-valleys. being previously saved.
RFID Technology
In recent years, there have been rise in the number of
applications based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
systems and have been successfully applied to different areas
as diverse as transportation, health-care, agriculture, and
hospitality industry to name a few [13]. “RFID technology
facilitates automatic wireless identification using electronic
passive and active tags with suitable readers. The application
of RFID to student attendance monitoring as developed and
deployed in recent years is capable of eliminating time
wasted during manual collection of attendance and an
opportunity for the educational administrators to capture
face-to-face classroom statistics for allocation of appropriate
attendance scores and for further managerial decisions” [13].
Figure 2 shows an intersoft RFID reader and the tag.
3.1. Fingerprint Module high reliability, small fingerprint template (496 bytes), large
fingerprint capacity, etc. It is convenient to be embedded to
Fingerprint acquisition equipment mainly has three kinds: user system for realizing clients required fingerprint
Optical Fingerprint Sensors, Semiconductor Fingerprint verification products
Sensors and Ultrasonic Fingerprint Sensors [10]. In this
system, R305 fingerprint module is used as shown in Figure
5. It consists of optical fingerprint sensor, high performance
DSP processor and Flash. It has 64kb user flash memory
[10]. “It can store 512 fingerprint templates. It performs the
functions such as fingerprint login, fingerprint deletion,
fingerprint verification, fingerprint upload, fingerprint
download, etc. When reading fingerprint images, it has self-
adaptive parameter adjustment mechanism which improves
imaging quality for both dry and wet fingers” [10].
The Microcontroller is the backbone of the system. In this The Arduino SD Card module is a simple solution for
system, Atmega8 microcontroller is used. It has 64kB Flash transferring data to and from a standard SD card. The pin out
and 1024 bytes of data RAM [16]. “It is also in Application is directly compatible with Arduino, but can also be used
Programmable (IAP), allowing the Flash program memory to with other microcontrollers. It allows you to add mass
be reconfigured even while the application is running. It storage and data logging to your work [20]. An Arduino SD
drives the control logic behind every functionality, some of Card module is shown in Figure 9.
which are: Power up and initialize it and dependent modules, The SD card, Figure 11 and 12, module specifications are
Check for interrupts, faults while the modules get initialized, as follows; operating voltage of 5V, SPI Communication
Command the fingerprint module to function as requested by method, SD card Socket, Supports FAT16 and FAT32,
the software interface and enable data transfer through the Support 2 GB to 4 GB. The SD card saves the attendance
wireless module” [16]. details in a, txt file every time the student’s attendance is
taken. The SD card is connected to the computer system to
enable the uploading of the, txt file to the window
application.
3.8. Window Application for Database when the same fingerprint is being sensed again. The database
keeps track of all the student’s record and attendance details.
The attendance monitoring system software is successfully
designed using C sharp. See appendix A for program source
code. The software is designed with an easy to understand user
interface, good graphics and the student’s details can easily be
exported to excel format. The work flow diagram is shown
below in Figure 13.
3.9. Circuit Diagram
be used to power the device as shown above in Figure 6. computer system. The device must always be connected to
The systm was tested during every stage of the the window application when enrolling and registering
construction and diagrams showing the various stages are students so that the student details can be stored in the
shown in Figure 20 and Figure 23. database. This was also tested as shown below in Figure 21
The device is connected to the window application on the efficaciously.
system has a very high accuracy; it is quite economical [6] Tirmann, V., & Tăbuşcă, A. (2016). University Student
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