International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19M19-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7799-5
Implementation of IOT based Attendance
Management System on Raspberry Pi
1st V Ruhitha 2nd V N Prudhvi Raj
IV Year B.Tech,EIE Department Assoc.Prof, EIE Department
VR Siddhartha Engineering College VR Siddhartha Engineering College
Vijayawada, India Vijayawada, India
ruhitha.v27@gmail.com nagaprudhvi@gmail.com
Abstract—The biometric-based attendance monitoring system
replaces the manual method of taking attendance and reduces
the time to take attendance and avoids proxy. There are many
biometric methods developed based on the fingerprint recogni-
tion, DNA matching, face recognition, Iris recognition and voice
recognition. Out of all, the methods based on face recognition are
proved to be the best methods. In this paper we are presenting
the implementation of attendance monitoring system based on
the facial recognition. In this method the image database of
the classroom is created first and the database is used to train
the system. Then in recognition phase the camera is fixed at
the focal point in the classroom and it will capture the images,
then from the captured images student’s faces are recognized &
compared with the database and lastly the attendance is marked
based on the faces identified. The marked attendance is directly
reported to the students/parents and to the faculty handling the
respective course. In this method, Haar cascade classifier is used
to detect the faces and captured images are compared with the
database by using local binary pattern histogram algorithm. The
face recognition system is implemented on the Raspberry Pi 3B
hardware.
Index Terms—Automatic attendance,Biometric,Face detection,
Face Recognition,LBPH, Haar Classifier.
I. INTRODUCTION
Many universities, colleges, and schools follow the
conventional face to face attendance marking. This traditional
method requires a lot of time, sometimes students may
not respond to their respective numbers and it involves
errors during the manual calculation of attendance. So to
overcome these problems there is a necessity for an automatic
attendance monitoring system. This automatic attendance
monitoring system involves biometric processes. One of
the biometric methods is fingerprint identification [1]. In
this method, the fingerprints of each student is collected
and are stored in the database. When the thumb is placed
on the fingerprint sensor it compares it with the database
and takes attendance. But the disadvantage in this method
is the students should wait in the queue to give their
prints so it is a time taking process. The other method of
biometric is iris. In this method, the eyeball or iris of each
student is taken and stored in the database. when eyeballs
matches with the database it takes attendance. This is a time-
consuming method and in practice, it is difficult to implement.
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3rd G Geetha
Asst.Prof, Dept. of Information Technology
VR Siddhartha Engineering College
Vijayawada, India
geetaguttikonda@gmail.com
The best biometric method to take attendance is face
recognition [2]. In this method, each student’s face is
collected and stored in the database. When the student is in
front of the camera it takes images, compares those images
with the database and marks the attendance. This method
requires less time and provides accurate results, improves
security levels and low fraud rate. This face recognition
method can widely be used in various sectors like health care,
banking, advertising, retail, universities, corporate offices.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
There are many feature extraction and recognition
algorithms which extract the features from the image and
recognize them with the existed database.
Eigen Faces algorithm was developed by Sirovich and
Kirby (1987) and used by Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland
in face classification [3]. This algorithm captures the variation
in the collected faces and compares it with individual faces
by generating a set of eigenvectors from the image by the
principal component analysis. The eigenvectors are derived
based on the covariance matrix of the probability distribution
over the high-dimensional vector space of face images.
Fisher faces algorithm is derived by an idea suggested
by R.A.Fisher in 1936. This algorithm is an enhancement
to Eigen faces that uses linear discriminant analysis. The
linear discriminant analysis finds the linear combination of
features that characterizes or separates two or more classes of
faces. The resulting combination is used for the reduction of
dimensionality. This algorithm is used when there is a large
variation in the illumination and facial expressions [4].
Local binary pattern histogram algorithm is described in the
year 1994 and was a powerful technique for feature extraction.
In this algorithm, the grayscale image is divided into cells of
the 3X3 matrix. The obtained matrix is represented with the
range of pixel intensities. The center value of the matrix is
considered as the threshold and each pixel value is compared
with the threshold. If the pixel value is greater than the
threshold it is given 1 otherwise 0. An 8-digit binary value
584
 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19M19-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7799-5
and is converted into decimal value for convenience. Then
the histogram is computed over the cells and frequency of
each number and concatenate the histogram of all cells to
obtain the feature vector. This feature vector is processed to
classify the images [2], [5].
Scale-invariant feature transform algorithm is published by
David Lowe in 1999. This algorithm detects and describes
the local features in the images. Whenever the image is
transformed, like the size of the image is altered or when
it is rotated the features of the image is invariable. These
invariable features are used to detect the image [6].
Speed up robust feature algorithm was presented by Herbert
Bay, Tuytelaars, T. and Van Gool in the year 2006. This
algorithm is patented local feature detector and descriptor.
SURF descriptors are used to locate and recognize objects,
people or faces, to reconstruct 3D scenes, to track objects
and to extract points of interest. This algorithm uses a multi-
resolution pyramid technique where the image is transformed
into coordinates to copy the original image with Pyramidal
Gaussian shape to obtain an image with the same size but
with decreased bandwidth [7] .
Many advanced algorithms are developed in the last decade.
But these algorithms demand more hardware requirements
than the present hardware used to execute them without any
difficulty [8]–[14].
III. I MPLEMENTED S YSTEM
The implemented system can be used for taking the
attendance in universities, colleges, and offices. The
architecture of the system is shown in Figure 1. A webcam
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the system
is connected to Raspberry pi3 b+ and it is placed at the focal
point in the classroom. This webcam captures the images
and extracts human faces. Then recognize the faces with the
existing database through library files present in the openCV.
The steps involved are as follows.
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A. Capturing images
The camera module is placed at the focal point in the
classroom or office. A camera module is used for capturing
the samples of the classroom. These samples are used for
recognition of faces and to mark the attendance.
B. Creating database
As biometric method has been chosen for marking the
attendance it is important for enrolment of every individual
whose attendance has to be taken. The face of every individual
is captured, converted into grayscale and are stored in the
database which includes a person’s identity number. Here
multiple samples are taken for each individual with different
facial expressions.
Fig. 2. Database of the captured faces
C. Detecting faces
The faces in the image are detected by Haar cascade
classifier. This method was method proposed by Paul Viola and
Michael Jones. Haar cascade classifier is available in OpenCV
source library which contains pre-trained classifiers for face,
eye, smile, etc. Haar cascade classifier mainly classifies the
face based on the edge features and corner features. This
classifier has high detection accuracy and low false positive
rate.
D. Preprocessing
The captured image may contain unnecessary background
noise and elements other than faces. It is important to remove
such elements. Feature extraction is the method that reduces
the image to only face available in the image. By this method,
the image is reduced to a size of 150x150.
E. Face recognition
Face recognition involves two steps of training and feature
extraction. To recognize faces we should train the algorithm
with images and their respective identity numbers. Feature ex-
traction is done by many face recognition algorithms available
in OpenCV like eigenfaces, Fisher faces, local binary pattern
histogram(LBPH).LBPH algorithm is simple and widely used
to recognize faces. In this algorithm, each image is analyzed
independently. In this algorithm, the grayscale image is di-
vided into cells of the 3X3 matrix. The obtained matrix is
585
 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19M19-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7799-5

represented with the range of pixel intensities. The center

value of the matrix is considered as the threshold and each
pixel value is compared with the threshold. If the pixel value
is greater than the threshold it is given 1 otherwise 0. An
8-digit binary value and is converted into decimal value for
convenience.Then histogram is computed over the cells and
frequency of each numbers and concatenate the histogram of
all cells to obtain the feature vector. This feature vector is
processed to classify the images [2], [5], [15]. An image in
Local binary pattern histogram is mathematically represented
as,
p−1
X
LBP (xn , yn ) = 2p S (ip − ic ) (1)
p=0

ip is the central pixel intensity and ic is the intensity of the

neighbouring pixel. S is the signum function defined as

1 x≥0
S (x) = (2)
0 else

This description enables to capture very fine grained details

in images. This to align an arbitrary number of neighbors on
a circle with a variable radius, which enables to capture the
neighborhoods shown in figure 3.

Fig. 4. Flowchart of the algorithm

A. Hardware Software Used

Fig. 3. Neighbourhood with variable radius to extract features Raspberry Pi 3b:Broadcom BCM2837B0, Cortex-
A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.4GHz, 1GB LPDDR2
SDRAM, 2.4GHz and 5GHz IEEE 802.11.b/g/n/ac wireless
For a given Point (xn , yn ) the position of the neighbour
LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, BLE, Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0
(xp , yp ) can be calculated by using the following equation
(maximum throughput 300 Mbps), 4 x USB 2.0 ports, HDMI,

2Πp
 CSI camera port for connecting a Raspberry Pi camera,
xp = xc + R cos (3) DSI display port for connecting a Raspberry Pi touchscreen
P
display, 2.0 graphics, OpenGL ES 1.1, MPEG-4 decode,
where R is the radius of the circle and P is the number of H.264, H.264 Encode. Micro SD port for loading your
sample points. operating system and storing data.

IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULTS
In this work a collection of 5 students along with 50
images of each individual person are taken and are stored
in the database with their respective identity number. These
50 images are trained to recognize faces. The camera module
which is placed at the focal point in the classroom captures
the 100 images of the classroom and recognize the faces in
the captured images. If the probability of face is greater than
50 then it is marked as present otherwise absent. As a result,
excel sheet with report of attendance is created, the list of
absentees is mailed to the head of department and SMS is
sent to the parents of absentees.
Software:Raspbian Operating System, OpenCV Image
Processing Library
(https://opencv.org), AWS IOT Sdk.
In this developed system if the occurrence of the face in
captured images is greater than 50 then attendance is marked
as present otherwise absent. As a result, excel sheet with
report of attendance is created, the list of absentees is mailed
to the head of department and sms is sent to the parents of
absentees. The same data will be pushed into the Amazon
Web Services cloud using AWS IOT sdk and the same can be
accesed through the android app from anywhere in the world.

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 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS 2019)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP19M19-ART; ISBN: 978-1-5386-7799-5

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V. CONCLUSION

The implemented attendance monitoring system is per-

forming with 96 percent accuracy. The system is using haar
classifier and LBPH algorithms for face detection and face
recognition. There are many algorithms develeloped in the
recent years based on wavelet transforms, support vector
machines, neural networks and deeplearning techniques. But
these advanced techniques requires the most sophisticated
hardware such as high end CPU’s and GPU’s. The cost of
the system is also increases with the advanced hardware. So
the implemented system is economical and very useful to
implement with low cost.

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