Automated Attendance Tracking System using Firebase Real-Time Database

Abstract

In school and college student’s attendance plays a vital role, there are cases reported that children are missing when they travel to and from school or college. According to Home ministry around 1 lakh children go missing, that has become a matter of critical importance. With an intention to keep students safe while fulfilling their basic rights to education, a design has been proposed that automatically updates the attendance of a student in the database and simultaneously sends information to the parent, class advisor and Head of the Department. This method has been designed to be implemented specifically in college, the approach of taking the attendance on daily and hourly basis is a reason for students to behave disciplined. Sometimes the traditional practice of taking attendance seems to be complicated and there are ways where a student can dodge and if taken physically it leads to more time consumption and can be prone to human errors. Hence several automated techniques were devised like fingerprint, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Iris recognition etc. these techniques have their own shortcomings, here a framework called Automated Attendance Tracker using Firebase Real-time Database is proposed. This effort defines an efficient object detection algorithm i.e. Haar Cascade algorithm that automatically identifies the student and updates the server through Representational State Transfer Application Program Interface (REST API) without much human effort. The attendance is taken by placing a web camera inside the classroom that endlessly captures the images of the student, identifies the faces in image and updates the attendance. The updated attendance is sent to the parent and class advisor thorough Short Message Service (SMS) and via Electronic-mail to the Head of the Department (HOD) and Administration wing. This highly improves the efficiency of system and is found to be less time consuming.