Problem/Objective

One of the challenges that public schools in the state of Tamil Nadu, India is struggling to address is that of student attendance. Manual marking of attendance tends to waste the limited teaching resources of a school, in addition to being prone to errors and manipulation. The objective of the initiative is to help teachers in reducing the burden of manual attendance marking and providing an attendance management solution for maintaining and managing attendance records in safe and secure way.  

Solution/Approach

This calls for an unobtrusive and accurate system that does not rely on any manual work by the teachers. TNeGA has developed a cost-effective DL-FRS, a deep learning approach for facial recognition-based attendance system, which runs on lightweight edge computing device, with an integrated camera. 

Students can just walk into the school and the system automatically, recognizes each of them by face and marks their attendance. The user-friendly attendance management application helps school management in effective tracking of attendance records. 

Impact/Implementation

Earlier, teachers used to spend more than 45 minutes on attendance marking which has been reduced significantly. Students happily walk into the school and without any complicated process the attendance gets marked by the face recognition system. With the user-friendly FRS, teachers can easily track attendance of students, download, print and manage attendance records at ease with minimal time and effort. 

Another unintended impact noticed after the implementation was schools started to see 85% drop in latecomers and in turn improving overall productivity of the class.