Low-Resolution Face Recognition for CCTV and Edge-Powered Smart Attendance Systems

Attendance systems have become more modern, and one of the biometric systems without physical contact is face recognition. However, many face-based attendance systems still carry out attendance individually and cannot detect multiple faces simultaneously. In addition, capturing facial data in real-time is still a challenge because the relatively large distance between the camera and the individual reduces the ability to recognize faces. The general solution is to use super-resolution to generate better-quality faces while maintaining the main facial recognition features. One technique still being researched is super-resolution generative adversarial networks (SRGAN). SRGAN can enlarge the resolution of captured images and maintain image quality sufficient for face recognition. The attendance system can be easily integrated into edge devices such as the Jetson Nano. This paper proposes automatic and effective attendance systems with the super-resolution technique to detect and recognize faces in low-resolution input. The experimental results show that using face data capture with a resolution of 40 × 40 pixels and a four-fold magnification results in a resolution of 160 × 160 pixels. Combining Face SRGAN with FaceNet architecture as the basis of face recognition can achieve an accuracy rate of 78.19% and an F1-Score of 81.13% with an average processing time of 1.61 seconds per frame on a PC and 14.55 seconds per frame on a Jetson Nano at an average of face recognition per frame of as many as up to 8 faces simultaneously.