A Microcontroller-Based Face Recognition Attendance System

Abstract

Attendance management system is an indispensable system by which every organisation tracks employees or students attendance. The manual process of marking attendance by using a paper-based or file-based system is susceptible to loss, falsification or disaster. One of the most interesting and important ways used in the past two decades in attendance management systems is the face recognition systems.

This paper proposes a face recognition attendance system using ESP32-CAM development board, which is a low-cost microcontroller with built-in camera and Wi-Fi capability. The system captures and registers a facial image of a student, many student images are stored in the ESP32-Cam permanent internal storage. When attendance tracking is enabled, the face of a student in front of the camera will be detected and recognition process is performed where the tested image is compared with the stored images; once recognition is done, the recognized student data is sent wirelessly via http protocol to a MySQL database for further attendance report management.