Fingerprint-Based Authentication System for Time and Attendance Management

Aims: Taking student attendance manually and maintaining it for a long time is a difficult task as well as wastes a lot of time. In this paper an Educational Time and Attendance Management System (EduTAMS) that will record and manage the time and attendance of students in a university community was developed.
Study Design: The system was implemented using C# and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and was tested using electronic fingerprint scanner which was interfaced to the digital computer system for verifying student identity.
Place and Duration of Study: The students of University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria fingerprint attendance were captured during the 2012 academic session.
Methodology: The system comprises of four main modules namely; fingerprint capture, fingerprint processing, fingerprint matching and database while the deployment structure of the system also consists of four major segments; Fingerprint Terminals, Database Server, Access Workstations and Network Service. EduTAMS uses fingerprint technology to authenticate every student. A fingerprint recognition system uses the distinctive and persistent characteristics from the ridges, also referred to as fingerprint features, to distinguish one person from another.
Results: When eduTAM was compared with the manual method, the result shows that the average time taken per student using fingerprint based attendance and manual attendance register are 6.65 and 23.66 seconds respectively.
Conclusion: The performance of the eduTAM system shows that it provides robust, secured and automatic time and attendance management system for Students.