Implementation of Face Patterns and Smile Recognition for Intelligent Class Attendance Systems

Students “attendance in class is one important success parameter in face-to-face learning processes. Conventional attendance systems, such as paper-based attendance sheets or identity card systems, require a long time in the manual recapitulation process. Without additional verifications, even computer vision-based methods are prone to fraudulent practices by the students instead of gaining their excitement and attention in a class. To stimulate students” attention in a class, this work designs an intelligent class attendance system, in which facial pattern and smile recognition are implemented by using the latter as an additional task-based verification to reduce the risks of fake attendance. For the face recognition module, this pilot study used FaceNet as a feature extractor combined with SVM for classification, whereas the Haar cascade algorithm is used for recognizing smiles. This face recognition pipeline was implemented as a service installed on minicomputers or Internet of Things (IoT) devices in each classroom and connected to an IP camera. Every recorded attendance will be sent as a notification to a mobile application for students that requires their active participation to confirm it with a smiling self-photo. The proposed pipeline obtained 92.86% accuracy on the test data, and 66.67% accuracy when evaluated in a real-life simulation setting through the implemented system. The lower accuracy in the simulation indicated that further improvements are indispensable, especially since the model obtained 28.57% False Negative Rate. Future studies will need to acquire more data and experiment with more efficient methods of attendance verification.