Automated Cheating Detection in Exams
using Posture and Emotion Analysis
​Mr. Nishchal J
CSE,R.V.College of Engineering CSE,R.V.College of Engineering
Bengaluru, India
n​ishchalj.cs18@rvce.edu.in sanj​anasr.cs18@rvce.edu.in
Abstract​- ​Cheating in exams has become a serious issue
these days. Exams play an important role in every
student’s life. Cheating in exams has been a widespread
phenomenon all over the world regardless of the levels of
development. Detection of manual cheating detection
methods may no longer be wholly successful, to fully
prevent cheating during examinations. There is a need to
make this process automated and efficient. The suggested
method makes the process of invigilation and cheating
detection totally automated. Hence there is no need to
rely on manual methods.
Keywords-Posture detection, face recognition, emotion
analysis, cheating activity detection​.
I. INTRODUCTION
Cheating in exams has become a widespread
phenomenon in the world regardless of the levels of
detection development. Many studies have been
conducted over the past decade about cheating
activities performed by students and the means by
which university could attempt to combat this problem.
In the U.S., it was revealed that 95% of secondary
school students who admitted cheating said that they
had not been caught, 51% of secondary school
students did not believe cheating was wrong.
There are three main reasons why students cheat in
exams; being afraid of failure, wanting to take risks
and having no fear of getting caught. While the first
factor is purely under the student’s control, the other
factor can be controlled.[1] This majorly happens due
to poor invigilation, or less number of invigilators to
assist. Hence manual invigilation has many demerits
and making this system automated makes this system
foolproof and reliable.
The aim of this model is to detect abnormal or
cheating activities in an exam in an automated way. In
our model, this is done by detecting the body posture
of the student during the examination using the CCTV
footage of the classroom. Actions like turning back,
978-1-7281-6828-9/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 
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Ms.Sanjana Reddy Ms. Navya Priya N
CSE, R.V. College of Engineering
Bengaluru, India. Bengaluru, India
navyapriyan.cs18@rvce.edu.in
bending etc, are detected which are considered as
possible cases of cheating. If the number of such cases
detected are more than a predefined threshold, it is
determined as cheating and a report is sent to the
examiners. This situation can be reviewed again by the
examiner to make a final decision. Faces are registered
to a database by using a dataset creator which is
implemented using OpenCV. The student who is
caught cheating is recognized using facial recognition
and a report about their activities along with a
timestamp is sent to the examiners following which
action can be taken after reviewing the report.
This kind of system has never been implemented
before which makes it unique. The possibility of
conducting an exam without the presence of an
invigilator is unthought of and is definitely needed to
make examinations strict and efficient. The time and
energy of the invigilators can be definitely used
productively elsewhere.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
There are models which classify abnormal activities in
examinations using Multi-class Markov Chain Latent
Dirichlet Allocation. These models are used as feature
detectors to detect arm joints, shoulders and the
position of the head. This model classifies the activities
into 5 possible classes and uses a supervised dynamic
and hierarchical Bayesian model for the same [2].
Many works propose methods to detect abnormal
behavior from videos. The main task in detecting
abnormal activity is to establish what abnormality is.
The method proposed to detect abnormal activity is to
detect normal activities and define the rest as
abnormal. A supervised model is used to classify the
activities.[3]
Gesture recognition is used to generate textual
d​escription of the cheating activity .​The gesture
 

recognition model works with 3DCNN and XGBoost
and a language generation model is based on an LSTM
network. The textual description is used to keep a
record of all such activities[4]​. ​There are works which
detect cheating activity in an exam through whispering
of the cheater. This uses features such as energy, root
mean square, time duration and spectral features for the
same. An alarm is made to ring whenever the
whispering level crosses a threshold which is
calculated using Z-score.[5]
A.Posture detection using OpenPose
The first stage is the posture detection. We use the
OpenPose model for posture detection. OpenPose can
detect the key points of the human body. The
coordinates of the key points can be used to estimate
the sitting posture of the person. 0 to 18 are the key
points detected by the model as seen in Fig 1 [8].
i. Dataset

Work has been done to detect cheating in ​online exams For this the presence of a CCTV camera is required
as well. These works mainly rely on a webcam wherein since the footage from the camera is passed to the
analysis of a test taker’s behavior is done by checking model. It is required that the camera be placed such
the time delay and the variation of a student’s head that the lateral view of the student is captured. The
pose relative to the computer screen[6]. Usage of RGB video captured from the CCTV is sent to the model as
cameras followed by analysis and classification by input directly in real-time for analysis.
algorithms such as Support Vector Machine, depth
sensors and wearable devices are common for activity
recognition. It is observed that use of Kinect sensor or
depth sensor into a human activity recognition system
gives accurate results.[7]

The amount of work done to detect cheating activity in

offline exams is limited. This model attempts to detect
cheating activity in an exam by incorporating both
posture and emotion analysis which has never been
attempted before. Nonverbal communication provides
Fig 1. key points detected by open pose
a significant amount of information about the posture
of a human. Body posture significantly affects the
ii. Model Implementation and Training
emotions of a human, which should also be a factor to
consider while designing models involving detection of
abnormal activities. This idea is incorporated in this
model which has never been ventured before.

Inclusion of a facial recognition system makes it an

appropriate model to be used in public exams where a
large database of participating students is readily
available. This model also provides an alert system and
also some room for modifications in the report
generated by authority in case of false alerts.
Incorporation of this model for smooth conduction of
Fig 2.Network architecture of OpenPose model
exams is surely recommended to make the process of
exam invigilation automatic. The VGG Block consists of 5 blocks as seen in Fig 2.
In Stage 1 a 2-branch multistage CNN is used .The first
III. METHODOLOGY
branch predicts a set of 2D Confidence Map​s of body
The model consists of 5 parts: part locations. ​The second branch predicts a set of 2D
vector fields of Part Affinities (PAF), which encode the
A.Posture detection using OpenPose degree of association between parts.[10]
Stage 0 creates feature maps for the input image and
B.ALEXNET model to detect type of cheating
has two branches. Each branch has 5 convolution
C.Emotion Analysis layers. The branches have 128 and 19 outputs
respectively. Next, the stage T block, iterated for 6
D.Face Recognition and E. Report Generation stages, has two branches.

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Each branch consists of 7 convolution layers. The
branches have 38 and 19 outputs respectively.[9]
iii. Results And Analysis
Fig 3. a)Possible case of cheating where the student is turning back
b)Output of the OpenPose model.
Fig 4.Output of the posture detector which shows that both the eyes
are seen hence the student is not sitting straight which is a possible
case of cheating.
Fig5. a)Student sitting straight in an exam
b)Output of OpenPose model.
Fig 6.Output of the posture detector which says that only one eye is
seen in the lateral view.
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The factors considered in our model, which are used to
detect possible cases of cheating, considering that the
image is taken in lateral view are: [10][11]
1. When a person turns back, their both the eyes
are captured by the camera as shown in Fig 3.
The output is shown in Fig 4.
2. If a person is not turning back, and sitting
straight, the image captured in the lateral view
will contain only one eye as shown in Fig 5. The
output is shown in Fig 6.
3. In a lateral view either the right ear or left ear is
captured. The angle between either ear and the
hip is calculated. If that angle is less than 70
degrees the person is sitting with a hunchback. If
it is greater than 110 degrees, the person is
reclined. If the ears are not visible, the person is
not in a lateral view.[11]
When any of the above cases are highlighted, the
model terms it as possible cases of cheating.
B. ALEXNET model to detect type of cheating
Human activity recognition and analysis is a powerful
research point in video perception and analysis.
Cheating activity can be detected if a student’s posture
seems to be abnormal or not regular for a long period
of time or if this abnormality is detected frequently
over a time frame. Hence, student posture analysis and
detection is of prime importance. In the proposed
technique, there is a continuous capture of video from
the CCTV, monitoring the students writing the
examination. When there is a signal from the key point
detection model, this model does a frame by frame
analysis of the CCTV footage, so as to clearly extract
the output or the type of activity the student is indulged
in. [7]
i. Dataset
The 4 main target classes here are ​Bending back,
Stretching the arms behind, Bending down, Facing the
camera as shown in Fig 7. A ground truth Dataset for
the same was created in which the team members of
this project were made to sit in different positions and a
video of the same was recorded. Later these were
converted into individual frames. About 1000 images
for every class was filtered and curated. The images are
resized to 224*224 pixels, the colour jitter (brightness,
hue, saturation and contrast) was set to 0.1% and thus
the images were normalised.

Fig 7. Sample Dataset.
ii. ​Model Implementation and Training
The model was built on the basis of transfer learning
approach. ALEXNET model, trained on Imagenet dataset
of 1000 classes, was used to train on the Posture detection
data here. Alexnet model was developed by Alex
Krizhevsky which was the winning entry in ILSVRC
2012. It is a light weight neural network having 5
convolutional layers and 3 fully connected layers as shown
in Fig 8. The first two Convolutional layers have a
convolution of 11*11 and 5*5 matrices with strides of 2
and 2 units respectively. The overlapping max pooling
layer follows the two convolution layers. These maxpool
layers are similar to the other max pool layers, except that
the adjacent windows over the max are computed and
overlap each other.
Fig 8.Architecture of ALEXNET Model
Alexnet uses a pooling window of 3*3 with stride of 2.
The next two layers are densely connected with another
overlapping max pool layer. The last two densely
connected layers feed into softmax for classification
labels. ReLU nonlinearity is applied after every
convolution layer, to normalize the outputs of each
layer. In the cheat detection model the last softmax
layer is altered such that the number of output classes
are reduced to 4 as shown in the fig 7.[8]
The training was done with Py-Torch backend on
Google Colab platform which provided free GPU
usage for research. The training was done for 20
epochs after which, an accuracy of 0.96 was reached.
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The high accuracy rate was achieved mainly because of
using a pre-trained model which was already trained on
a huge dataset called Imagenet for about 1000 classes.
iii. Testing and Results
A whooping accuracy of 0.96 was maintained
constantly even for the test dataset. The graph between
the number of epochs and accuracy has been shown in
Fig 9. Thus, this model was well trained for detecting
the posture of the student and sending it for further
analysis to the facial recognition model.
Fig 9.Accuracy on the validation set during training
D. Emotion Analysis
Facial expressions play a very important role, like
body language, in human interactions. Hence by using
a sentiment analyzer in our code, we can systematically
come to a conclusion, if the student actually has an
intention to cheat in the exam. So, once the type of
cheating is detected from the previous model, now the
same images i.e., the set of images obtained after
converting the video to a series of frames are sent to
the sentiment analyzer model wherein the emotion in
the face of the student is detected. As many frames are
sent, a number of emotions can be detected(one for
each frame). Hence, the emotion which has maximum
frequency in that particular period of time is being
considered for further evaluation. In order to be more
accurate and not falsely allege a person of malpractice,
the second most frequent emotion is also
considered.[16]
i. Dataset
The datasets considered here are, Facial Expression
Recognition Challenge (FERC-2013), Extended
Cohn-Kanade (CK+) , and Radboud Faces Database
(RaFD). These datasets mainly differ in quality,
quantity and ‘cleanness’ of the images. The
FERC-2013 set has around 32000 low resolution
images , to which RaFD provides 8000 high resolution
images. Also, facial expressions in CK+ and RaFD are
clean, but FERC-2013 set shows ​emotions ‘in the
wild’.Considering three networks,training is done

using 9000 samples from FERC-2013 along with 1000
new samples for validation as shown in Fig 10. Testing
will be done with 1000 images from RaFD set to get an
indication of performance on clean high quality data.
In order to improve the accuracy further training was
done with 20,000 images from the FERC-2013 set.
Newly composed validation (2000 images) and test
sets (1000 images) from the FERC-2013 dataset are
used as well, together with the well-balanced RaFD
testset.[17]
Fig 10.Number of images per emotion in the final
training set.
The emotions taken into consideration here are –happy,
neutral, surprised, sad ,fearful ,angry, disgust. Hence,
when a student is mostly fearful, then it is likely that
the student is cheating.[17] .
ii. ​Model Implementation and Training
The network consists of three convolutional layers and
two fully connected layers, combined with maxpooling
layers to reduce the image size and a dropout layer so
that overfitting does not occur. The three network
layers are , network A, network B, network C.
The Haar Feature-Based Cascaded Classifier is used
inside the OpenCV framework , all data is
preprocessed. For every frame obtained from the
previous model, only the square part containing the
face is taken, which is rescaled, and then converted to
an array with 48x48 grey-scale values. This 48*48
input is sent to the first convolutional layer A which
has a filter of 5*5 and gives 64 outputs and hence is
normalized to 44*44 image. After applying maxpool of
two strides , 22*22 images are obtained which are
further sent to the next network B , which also has 5*5
filter and gives 64 outputs and after normalization,
18*18 images are obtained which are sent to the third
layer C, where a filter of 4*4 is used which gives 128
outputs and after normalization 15*15 images are
obtained. Optimization using softmax gives 7 outputs
after multiclass classification. The network gives
softmax scores for all the seven classes of emotions.
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The emotion with maximum score is considered to be
the overall emotion[17].
On the whole, after evaluating it on the test dataset, an
accuracy of 63% was achieved.
C. Face recognition
Once the possible cases of cheating is detected, the
person caught cheating has to be recognised and then
reported to respective authorities. This model has three
parts: dataset creator, Trainer and Detector.
i. Dataset
The dataset creator is needed to create a database of all
the students in an institute. All the faces detected are
compared with all the images in the database. SQlite is
used as a relational database management system. The
student id, name, age and gender are stored in the
database. This doesn’t require a separate server process
to operate. The image is converted to grayscale. The
face detected in the image can be used to insert it in the
database, as a new entry, when a new face is
recognised which is not present in the database or it
can be used to update existing data. This part is
majorly used when an institute wants to register
students in the database.[14]
ii. Model Implementation and Training
The detectmultiscale of Cascade classifier is used to
detect a face in an image. The trainer uses the Local
Binary Patterns Histograms (LBPH) as the face
recognition algorithm. We use OpenCV's LBPH Face
Recognizer to train the dataset.[15] The new image is
passed through the detector to detect the face and fetch
the details of the student.
E. Report generation
The details of the student caught cheating is sent via
mail to the respective authorities. The CCTV footage
can be reviewed again if needed.We use python’s
native library to send emails which is called SMTP lib.
“smtplib” creates a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
client session object which is used to send emails to
any valid email id on the internet.
IV. LIMITATIONS
One of the requirements of this model is that the CCTV
camera is to be placed in a lateral position. This is one
of the main limitations of the model. This model fails
to detect cheating activity among multiple people in the
camera feed. The model requires the input to be in
lateral view only. The front view of the person doesn’t

give the desired output. When there are multiple people
in a row the lateral view captures only one person.​The
camera must be adjusted at a sufficient height so that
all the people can be detected. When this is put to
action, there shall be slight changes in the angle
thresholds through which this model classifies the
sitting posture.
V. RESULTS
This paper follows a modular approach to build a
Cheat Detection Model. The Posture Recognition
model using the OpenPose model could successfully
locate 18 different points on a human body. A little
adaptation to the use case was made such that it could
successfully predict if a person is turning back or
sitting straight with the position of eyes and arms. The
Cheating posture detection model trained on Alexnet
architecture could predict the type of cheating
committed - ​Bending down, Arms extending back,
Fully turning back with a high accuracy of 96% on test
data. The Emotion Analysis model was used to analyse
the emotion of the student during the abnormal activity
with an accuracy of 65% on test data.
Combining the Cheating posture analysis model and
the Emotional analysis model and by taking the Mean
Square Root of their accuracies, we obtain the net
possible accuracy of our proposed model, i.e.
√(96) * (63) = 77.76 ≈ 77.8%
Thus, by combining the results of all the models, a
prediction is made on the cheating activity, after which
Facial recognition is used to recognise the student’s
identity. Report generation model is used to record all
the observations made by the above models and the
same is sent to the authority's email for further actions.
VI. CONCLUSION
Cheating in exams has been taking place in the world
regardless of significant development in technology
and advancement. Though online exams monitoring is
automated to some extent, offline exams still stick to
the traditional way of manual invigilation. Thus, this
paper has presented and got into action a state of art
technology to automate manual invigilation. The four
models developed here have equally contributed to
successful working of the Cheat Detection System with
a decent accuracy, thus paving the world towards a
new advancement in the educational system.
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