Fingerprint-Based Attendance Management System

Abstract

In recent time, there has been high level of impersonation experienced on a daily basis in both private and public sectors, the ghost worker syndrome which has become a menace across all tiers of government, employers concerns over the levels of employee absence in their workforce and the difficulty in managing student attendance during lecture periods. Fingerprints are a form of biometric identification which is unique and does not change in one’s entire lifetime. This paper presents the attendance management system using fingerprint technology in a university environment. It consists of two processes namely; enrolment and authentication. During enrolment, the fingerprint of the user is captured and its unique features extracted and stored in a database along with the users identity as a template for the subject. The unique features called minutiae points were extracted using the Crossing Number (CN) method which extracts the ridge endings and bifurcations from the skeleton image by examining the local neighborhoods of each ridge pixel using a 3 x 3 window. During authentication, the fingerprint of the user is captured again and the extracted features compared with the template in the database to determine a match before attendance is made. The fingerprint-based attendance management system was implemented with Microsoft’s C# on the. NET framework and Microsoft’s Structured Query Language (SQL) Server 2005 as the backend. The experimental result shows that the developed system is highly efficient in the verification of users fingerprint with an accuracy level of 97.4%. The average execution time for the developed system was 4.29 seconds as against 18.48 seconds for the existing system. Moreover, the result shows a well secured and reliable system capable of preventing impersonation.