International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)

ISSN: 2277-3878 (Online), Volume-8 Issue-4, November 2019

QR code based Visitor Management System for

Smart Offices
Santhosha Rao, Casbona Jonathan

 these devices that is easily accessible and is used in the design

Abstract: In recent years, owing to the proliferation of the of applications is the small, low cost computer, Raspberry Pi,
Internet of Things (IoT), homes and offices are being translated when connected to a camera we can create a powerful visitor
into smart homes and offices. The paper demonstrates an IoT
system for managing the visitors in a smart office environment.
management system. The system is not intended to totally
The automation system comprises Raspberry Pi equipped with replace the job of the receptionist but intended to reduce the
camera and an android mobile phone. The Raspberry Pi equipped burden on the receptionist. It also helps in reducing the burden
with camera is kept in the visitor’s waiting area and the on the office professional in the absence of the receptionist.
consulting person possesses an android mobile phone in which There are several office automation works reported in the
the visitor management software is installed. The visitor takes an
literature based on Raspberry Pi. S.A Shaikh et.al [1]
appointment using the client application installed in his android
mobile phone by selecting an available slot and receives a QR designed an intelligent office area monitoring and control
code. The consulting person has the access to information system using IoT. An android mobile phone running an
regarding each appointment through professional application android application and Raspberry Pi are used to monitor and
installed in his android phone. Whenever the visitor shows the QR control the electrical appliances via voice commands. P.R.
code to the Raspberry Pi camera, the professional application is Rodge et.al [2] proposed an IoT based smart office interactive
notified and the consulting person is able to access the list of all
the visitors in real time. An intelligent token system is used to
automation system. The system designed using Raspberry Pi
determine the order of passage when several visitors are there at is intended to reduce the electricity consumption at the office
the office. by controlling the electrical appliances based on the number
Keywords : Android, Internet of Things, OpenCV, QR code, of visitors. Though there are numerous IoT solutions of these
Raspberry Pi . types available in the literature intended to control the devices
in the office environment, solutions intended for managing
I. INTRODUCTION the visitors arriving to meet the consulting person or office
Over the years, the office setting has changed dramatically professional are not much researched.
and most probably it is one of the environments most affected Aswin S [3] et.al designed a wireless office automation and
by technological advancements. With office equipment and security system using Raspberry Pi and an android mobile
tools getting smarter every day, it is now experiencing a major phone which helps the official to have direct interaction with
transformation into what is now being referred to as a smart the visitor while maintaining the visitor’s record in the smart
office. It also changes our customer habits. Booking a room phone. The Raspberry Pi connected to a push button, LCD
online via an application has become normal. Despite all these display and a camera is kept in the visitor’s area and the
developments, in many offices we find receptionists doing the official possesses an android mobile phone. Whenever the
same repetitive task such as organizing office professional’s visitor presses the button, his image is captured and
schedule, answering the phone calls, delivering the packages, transmitted to android mobile via Bluetooth. The official
managing the visitors etc. With the new technologies, the responds through the android application by sending a
burden on the receptionists could be reduced by an intelligent preconfigured message (Eg. Busy/In meeting) which is
system by incorporating cost-effective technological displayed on the LCD. Santhosha Rao et.al [4] designed a
solutions combined with the capabilities of smartphones and smart phone based cost effective visitor management system
IoT solutions that are easily accessible in the market. One of for smart offices which comprises of a nodeMCU based
wireless transmitter, nodeMCU based wireless display and an
android mobile phone. The office professional or consulting
person possesses an android mobile phone and the nodeMCU
Manuscript published on November 30, 2019. based transmitter and display are kept at visitor’s area. The
* Correspondence Author
Santhosha Rao*, Department of Information and Communication visitor enters a message using the keyboard connected to
Technology, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Wireless Transmitter and notes down the acknowledgement
Education, Manipal, INDIA. token number sent by the consulting person’s android mobile
Casbona Jonathan, Department of Embedded Systems and
Instrumentation, ESIGELEC School of Engineering, Rouen, France.
phone. When the consulting person checks this message, the
same token number is sent to the Wireless Display Unit
© The Authors. Published by Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and indicating the visitor to consult the person.
Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the
CC-BY-NC-ND license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Retrieval Number: D9404118419/2019©BEIESP

DOI:10.35940/ijrte.D9404.118419 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
8787 & Sciences Publication
 QR code based Visitor Management System for Smart Offices

Though these systems are very cost effective and convenient The client and professional applications send http request
to manage the visitors, there is no provision to take the to the server and use the response to obtain data. The server
appointments apriori. With an objective to address this URL is defined on the attribute URL from the singleton. The
problem, a cost effective visitor management system is Raspberry Pi also sends http request to the server. As the
designed which facilitates the visitor to take appointments client and professional applications have several common
apriori by selecting an available slot of his convenience. services, it was decided to combine them. Each device can
only add, update or request data on the database. To send the
II. SYSTEM DESIGN data, the POST request method is used. Each request has an
attribute “request”, which is a number that corresponds to a
The objective of the work is to create a system that allows a specific request. For example, to add a new person in the
client to take an appointment with a professional. Once the database, request value is 1. User information data is provided
appointment is made, the visitor will receive a QR code [5] to in the POST request and 1 is received if person is added else
be shown to the camera to have access to the professional's 0. The request 2 is for login. The application sends the email
office. The latter must be notified upon the visitor’s arrival. If address and the password. The server checks the password
several people are in the office at the same time, a token with the hash password stored in the database and sends the
system will determine the order of passage based on element user data if authenticated else 0. To show appointments, the
such as the importance of the case to be processed. A current date is sent with the request value of 4. To receive the
professional must be able to create availability and a visitor or list of appointments, the person ID is sent with 5 as request
client is able to reserve some available slots. value. An appointment is defined by the person ID and
The server is the communication hub between Client App, availability ID. This information is sent to add one to the
Professional App and Raspberry Pi equipped with camera as database with request value 6. The server response is 1 for
depicted in Fig.1. Raspberry Pi board [6] houses Broadcom success or 0 for a problem. After decrypting the QR code, the
BCM 2837 ARM cortex A53 quad core 1.2 GHz processor, 1 person ID and availability ID are sent to the server with
GB RAM, 10/100 Ethernet port, 40 pin GPIO header, request value 7. Fig.3 shows the use case diagram of the
Broadcom videocore lV GPU, Bluetooth 4.1, microSD system.
storage. The 5MP Omnivision 5647 Camera [7] Module is a
custom designed add-on for Raspberry Pi, is connected to
Raspberry Pi by means of one of the two small sockets on the
board’s upper surface. This interface uses the dedicated CSI
interface, which was designed particularly for interfacing to
cameras. Raspberry Pi to camera connection is depicted in
Fig.2.

Fig. 1.System Model

Fig. 3.System use case diagram

The data is organized in 3 entities namely, Person,

Availability and Appointments. An appointment is created
when a person is associated with an availability. Pro is 1 if the
person is professional else 0. Rating is the rate attributed by
the professional. The rate is between 0 to 10 and the default
value is 5. The date_start, date_end are the dates on
which the availability begins and ends respectively. The
priority is the indication of severity by the client. The
Fig. 2.Raspberry Pi to camera connection database design diagram is
depicted in Fig.4.

Retrieval Number: D9404118419/2019©BEIESP

DOI:10.35940/ijrte.D9404.118419 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
8788 & Sciences Publication
 International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)
ISSN: 2277-3878 (Online), Volume-8 Issue-4, November 2019

Fig. 4.Database design

Fig. 6.Service Life Cycle
For an application to be adopted, it is important to provide
a good user experience. In our case, user interface is an QR code is a method of representing data in a visual,
activity containing a large space for fragments as well as a machine-readable form like a barcode. Each appointment is
bottom navigation to easily access the different services of the defined by the person ID and the availability ID. For this
application. Fig.5 represents the access path to the different reason, the data on the QR code is structured as:
visible parts of the application. id_person ==; XX; id_availability ==; YY;
where XX & YY are integers.
The QR code image is generated by the smartphone from
the reservation information. Fig. 7 depicts the process of
scanning the QR code by the Raspberry Pi camera.

Fig. 7.QR code scanning using Raspberry Pi camera

Fig. 5.Access path to various parts of the Application
After decoding the QR code, the Raspberry Pi sends a
An activity is a single, focused thing that the user can do. request to the server to define the action to be performed. It
The Activity class takes care of creating a window in which uses the OpenCV library [8] to obtain the image and the Zbar
we place the user interface. A fragment represents a behavior library [8] to decode the QR code. QR code playback is
or a portion of user interface. We can think of a fragment as a performed on each image of the video stream coming from the
modular section of an activity. camera. In order not to send an untimely request to the server,
A service is an application component that can perform the Raspberry Pi only makes a request if the QR code read is
long-running operations in the background so that the different from the previous QR code detected. When several
professional is informed about the arrival of a customer. An people are in the waiting room at the same time, it is important
android service runs in the background to ask for the list of to define a sequence for each client. To decide who has the
people who have arrived. This period depends on the value of priority, a score is associated for each client entering the
interval Millis (1200 milliseconds by default). As depicted in office. The score is calculated based on the order of arrival in
Fig.6, the service starts and asks the server for the list of the waiting room, the order in which appointments are made,
people who have arrived in the waiting room. It compares this the priority given by the user and the score assigned to him by
list with the list of people kept in its memory and sends a the professional.
notification to the professional if the new list contains new
clients. Finally, the service sets up its next restart and stops.

Retrieval Number: D9404118419/2019©BEIESP

DOI:10.35940/ijrte.D9404.118419 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
8789 & Sciences Publication
 QR code based Visitor Management System for Smart Offices

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Fig.10, client can enter the purpose of visit and its priority on
a scale from 0 to 10.
First and foremost, requirement for the user to access the
features of the application is to register by giving the
information such as name, user name, email, phone number
and password. The user logs in by entering email id as user
name and password.
Now a window opens as depicted in Fig.8 with 3 buttons at
the bottom of the page which are used to navigate between the
activities. Availability button is used to show the availabilities
of the professional. Profile is used to show the user profile.
Pro button is only for the professional to the add availability.
The window also shows the appointments already taken by the
client. If an appointment is clicked, then an activity is started
to show QR code and token.

Fig. 10. Take appointment activity

Whenever the client clicks on an appointment, the QR code

associated with the appointment is displayed. The current
token number of the client is displayed upon clicking the
Refresh Token button as depicted in Fig.11.

Fig. 8. List of apppintments already taken by the client

Now the user can click the Availability button to see the
availability of the professional on the specific date. The
availabilities of the professional are listed under the calendar
as depicted in Fig.9. Whenever the client clicks on an
available slot, the take appointment activity will be started.

Fig. 11. Display QR code and current token number

A professional can specify his available slots by clicking

the Availability button. He must choose a day on the calendar,
the start time and end time to specify his availability as
depicted in Fig.12.

Fig. 9.List of availabilities of the professional

Using the take appointment activity window depicted in

Retrieval Number: D9404118419/2019©BEIESP

DOI:10.35940/ijrte.D9404.118419 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
8790 & Sciences Publication
 International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE)
ISSN: 2277-3878 (Online), Volume-8 Issue-4, November 2019

2. P. R. Rodge, Jaykant Prajapati, Anup Salve, Pallavi Sangle, “IoT

Based Smart Interactive Office Automation”, International Research
Journal of Engineering and Technology, Vol. 4, Issue 4, April .2017
3. Aswin S, K V Mahendra Prashanth, “ Wireless Office Automation &
Security System – A Novel Approach”, International Conference on
Recent Advances in Electronics and Communication Technology”,
IEEE, March 2017, Bangalore, India.
4. Santhosha Rao, Smitha A, Kunal Kulkarni, “Smart Phone based Cost
Effective Visitor Management System for Smart Offices”,
International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, Vol. 12, No.
6, 2018.
5. https://www.academia.edu/7424074/QR_Code_Generator_Tutorial
6. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-b/
7. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/camera/
8. https://www.learnopencv.com/barcode-and-qr-code-scanner-using-zbar-
and-opencv/

AUTHORS PROFILE

Santhosha Rao is currently working as

Associate Professor in the Department of
Fig. 12. Adding an appointment by the professional Information and Communication Technology,
Manipal Institute of Technology, MAHE,
The view appointment activity will be started whenever the Manipal, India. His research areas are Cross
Professional clicks on an appointment. As depicted in Fig.13, Layer Design, Energy Constrained Wireless
Networks, Internet of Things. He has around 20
he can see all the data given by the client. He then assigns a years of teaching experience.
rate and clicks on the Finish button to complete the
appointment.

Casbona Jonathan is currently pursuing

Engineering at the Department of Embedded
Systems and Instrumentation, ESIGELEC
School of Engineering, Rouen, France. He has
expertise in Real Time Operating Systems,
Microcontrollers and Embedded
communication.
.

Fig. 13. View activity

IV. CONCLUSION
The proposed QR code based visitor management system
provides a cost effective technological solution to the smart
offices by exploiting the capabilities of the android smart
phones along with a Raspberry Pi equipped with a camera.
The system not only helps in improving the efficiency of the
receptionists by reducing the load on them but also helps in
assisting the professionals in receptionist’s absence.

REFERENCES
1. S.A.Shaikh, Aparna S.Kapare, “Intelligent Office Area Monitoring and
Control using Internet of Things”, International Journal of Advanced
Research in Electrical, Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering
astics, Vol. 6, Issue 6, June 2017.

Retrieval Number: D9404118419/2019©BEIESP

DOI:10.35940/ijrte.D9404.118419 Published By:
Journal Website: www.ijrte.org Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
8791 & Sciences Publication