Development of a facial recognition system with email identification message relay mechanism

Attendance records play a vital role in the educational sector. It is so vital that students are not allowed to sit for examinations if they do not meet the class attendance benchmark. But students, instead of making sure they attend classes regularly, devise cunny ways of committing attendance fraud. This unpleasant trend has made it necessary to develop systems that can take accurate class attendance records and minimize fraud. The use of biometrics to develop attendance taking systems is becoming quite popular. One of such biometrics is The Face. In this paper, a facial recognition algorithm known as Fisherfaces or Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA) which is not sensitive to substantial variation in facial look and illumination is used to develop the facial recognition attendance taking system. The system implemented has a training database of Ten (10) students. Ten (10) facial images of each student are taken with different composures, looks and under different levels of illumination. Tests on nine (9) students in the database yielded accuracies of as low as 70% and as high as 90%. This validates the proof that the more the number of training facial image in the database, the higher the accuracy of Fisherfaces approach. The simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) was interfaced with the database to send identification messages (name of student identified with time and date of identification) to the email address of the administrator (in this case the lecturer) in real-time to effectively monitor the attendance. The result was found capable of eliminating attendance fraud.