Several government schools in Tamil Nadu are now utilising, an AI-enabled facial recognition system to mark the attendance of students. As soon as a student enters the school, the system will mark their arrival and the time. Currently, the system is on the pilot stage and is being tested. Soon the system will be rolled out to 3000 government schools across the state.  

FRAS (Face Recognition Attendance System) was completely developed by Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency(TNeGA), Information Technology Department, Government of Tamil Nadu. 

The system which is optimised to Indian conditions is robust and will work on extremely low frame rates and delivers accuracy of over 99.5 per cent. FRAS doesn't require any internet connection or a high computing platform and does not need an expert to operate it.  

In schools where the AI-based system has been implemented, have started to see an increase in students’ attendance. Including the hardware components, FRAS costs around Rs 3000. “Our school has seen an 85 per cent drop in stragglers. We are also able to save a lot of time(nearly up to an hour every day) as the teachers used to spend a lot of time every period to take attendance. ” says a spokesperson at a government school in Chennai’s Triplicane where the system is in the pilot.  

TNeGA has also developed a pest identification system that offers faster pest diagnosis and solutions to farmers. Farmers can click a photograph of pest infection through his phone and upload it to an app. An AI-based image processing system in the back end of the app processes this image and identifies what pest has infected the crop. In less than 24 hours, the farmer gets a message on the solutions he can implement to get rid of the pest. The app is currently used by about 500,000 farmers across the state. 

The state government is also planning to introduce AI in school curriculum soon. The department of school education said that it will include a course on AI from Classes VI to IX across government schools to help students understand the new technology. The courses will be implemented in a phased manner. 

Image by strudelt from Flickr