Biometric Fingerprint Attendance Management System

ABSTRACT

Fingerprint verification is one of the most reliable personal identification

methods in biometrics .With the rapid development of fingerprint
verification, a number of its applications have been proposed until now
including time attendance system etc. In this paper, a fingerprint
attendance management system is designed and implemented .This
system based biometrics and serial port communication technique solves
the problem of spurious attendance and trouble of maintaining the
register. It can make the users’ attendances more easily and effectively.
Key-Words: - fingerprint verification; biometrics attendance management
 1 INTRODUCTION

While the move towards the digital era is being accelerated every hour,
biometrics technologies have begun to affect people’s daily life more
and more. Biometrics technologies verify identity through characteristics
such as fingerprints, faces, irises, retinal patterns, palm prints, voice,
hand-written signatures, and so on. These techniques, which use
physical data, are receiving attention as a personal authentication
method that is more convenient than conventional methods such as a
password or ID cards. Biometric personal authentication uses data taken
from measurements. Such data is unique to the individual and remains
so throughout one’s life.
This technology has been applied for controlling access to high-security
facilities, but it is now being widespread developed in information
systems such as network, e-commerce, and retail applications. In these
technologies, fingerprint becomes the most mature and popular
biometrics technology used in automatic personal identification. In the
beginning, fingerprint verifying used in the military affairs and in the
criminal identification. But now, this technology is also being used in
several other applications such as access control for high security
installations, credit card usage verification, and employee identification.
The reason for the popularity of fingerprint verifying is that fingerprints
satisfy uniqueness, stability, permanency and easily taking. Just for this,
a number of fingerprint verification approaches have been proposed
until now
This system is an application of the fingerprint verifying and serial port
communication techniques and it is mainly used for employee
identification. Through practices, this system is proved to be easy-to-use
and effectively. And this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
describes the technological requirements for this system design. Section
3 outlines the functions of this system briefly and describes the
hardware and software design of this system. Section 4 introduces some
key problems in the implement of this system and finally Section 5
contains conclusions and future research plan.
 EXISTING SYSTEM

Most of the attendance systems use paper based methods for taking
and calculating attendance and this manual method requires paper
sheets and a lot of stationery material. Previously a very few work
has been done relating to the academic attendance monitoring
problem. Some software’s have been designed previously to keep
track of attendance. But they require manual entry of data by the
staff workers. So the problem remains unsolved. Furthermore idea
of attendance tracking systems using facial recognition techniques
have also been proposed but it requires expensive apparatus still
not getting the required accuracy.
 2 Requirements for System Design
2.1 Authentication Using Fingerprints:-
A attendance management is an important part of companies
management system. It can be in contact with salary of employee, work
efficiency of company and even affects business image of company and
staff morale. So the problem of reasonably, effectively and scientifically
managing of staff attendances has become all companies facing issue.
Traditional styles of attendance management include hand-written
signatures, card bell, magnetic card, IC card and RF card attendance
machines. These styles cannot avoid replacer checking out just because
that people can be separated from cards.

The great advantage of the authentication using fingerprints is the

irreplaceable nature. Through the analysis of the overall and local
characteristics of fingerprint such as ridges, valleys, ending, bifurcation
points and ridge divergence points, we can extract enough detail data.
Such data is unique to the individual and remains so throughout one’s
life. We can use these data to identify or verify a person operating as
follows:
(1) a digital image of one person’s fingerprint to be verified is captured; a
feature extracting algorithm is carried out; minutiae are extracted and
stored as a template for verifying later; people to be verified place his
finger on the fingerprint sensor so as to extracting the minutiae from the
captured image; a matching algorithm is applied to matches the minutiae
with the stored template previously. The overall block diagram of the
fingerprint verifying is shown in Figure below,

Fingerprint Sensor Fingerprint Sensor

Extracting the Extracting the

Minutiae(image) Minutiae(image)

Matching Result
Store as a template in a Minutiae matching
database
2.2 Transmission Using Off-Line Technique:-
There are mainly two kinds of fingerprint attendance management
system on the market. One is on-line fingerprint attendance
management system and the other is off-line fingerprint attendance
management system. On-line system always needs to connect with a PC
or workstation and all the fingerprints’ templates of people to be verified
must stored in the database in the PC or workstation. Thereby,
matching fingerprints needs the support of the background PC. This kind
of attendance management system is easy to paralysis in case of
malfunctions of fingerprint attendance machines, transmission line or
PC. Once several systems connect to form a network, burden of PC and
the response time of the system will be added.
And one off-line fingerprint attendance management system can finish
all the process including capturing the image of fingerprint, extracting
minutiae, storing and matching. All the operating of matching fingerprint
needn’t support of PC and the burden of PC is lightened. The same
systems can connect to form a 485 network and finally connect to the
center PC of management system. So off-line systems are widely used
in many occasions. And the shortcomings of this system are that there
must be a managing PC nearly and it is difficult to lay the transmission
lines where topography is bad.
3. System Description:-
3.1. Hardware:
A fingerprint sensor device along with an LCD screen is placed at
the entrance of Office room or staff room. The fingerprint sensor is
used to capture the fingerprints of staff members or employees
while LCD screen notifies the members that his/her attendance has
been marked.
3.2. Software Tools:
 For the development of the system, the following software tools
were used
 Java Software Development Kit
 Java IDE (Net Beans 6.5)
 MySql Database
3.3. Rules for marking attendance: -
I. Employees or staff members should scan his/her finger correctly on
the fingerprint sensor as shown in Figure 2. If fingerprint is not
enrolled correctly on reader as shown in Figure 3, it could lead to
biometric error i.e. biometric device does not make perfect match
decision.
There are two reasons for error Failure to enroll rate (FTE) and Failure to
capture (FTC) rate of biometric device FTC rate depends on functionality
of the system and FTE occur due to poor quality inputs.
3.4. Scenario of automatic attendance system:-
Figure 4 shows the scenario of automatic attendance system attached to
a main office or staff room. Database storage contains the fingerprint
templates of employees or staff members along with their information
(names, registration numbers and in-time, out-time). When employees of
staff members enrolls his/her finger on the scanner his/her fingerprint is
matched with database to mark the attendance.

OFFICE
ROOM

SENSOR AND LCD

Attendance Scanning
Update

DATABASE

Database Storage Employees/Staff Members

3.5. Implementation:-
Hardware equipment is placed at the door of Office room. Before
entering the room employees or members are identified through
fingerprint scanner. On identification of a employee his/her attendance is
marked.

Following sequence of steps summarize the process of marking the

attendance.
Step 1: Capture the student’s fingerprint sample and create a feature
set. A set of unique features created to match fingerprint is called
feature set.
Step 2: Retrieve the stored templates from the repository (database).
Step 3: Perform a one-to-n comparison between the fingerprint feature
set and the fingerprint templates stored in database, make a decision of
match or non-match.
Step 4: If match is found retrieve student’s information (Registration
number, Department, Subjects) from the database.
Step 5: Obtain the scheduled lecture from the database and mark
attendance if student is within the specified time i.e. within 30 minutes of
the lecture’s starting time (see rules for detail). If verification is not done or
there is some error in enrollment of fingerprint, system goes back to its
initial state without marking the attendance.
 Conclusion:-

It can be concluded from the above discussion that a reliable, secure,

fast and an efficient system has been developed replacing a manual
and unreliable system. This system can be implemented in academic
institutes for better results regarding the management of attendance.
This system will save time, reduce the amount of work the
administration has to do and will replace the stationery material with
electronic apparatus. Hence a system with expected results has been
developed but there is still some room for improvement.
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