International Conference on Computer, Communication, Chemical, Materials and Electronic

Engineering
IC4ME2-2017, 26-27 January, 2017

Paper ID: 67
Design & Development of Fingerprint Based Biometric Attendance System
Nawsher Ahmed, Iftekhar Hossain, Rabiul Hossen Rafi, Humayun Rashid, Qader Newaz, S M Taslim
Reza Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE)
International Islamic University Chittagong (IIUC)
Chittagong-4314, Bangladesh
E-mail: raahat.rashid09@gmail.com
Abstract—Now-a-days the management of student’s
The RFID based automated student attendance system
attendances during lecture periods has become a
[1] is designed to collect and manage student‘s
difficult task. Getting attendance through manual
procedure may create error while analyzing the attendance records from RFID devices installed in a
percentage of attendance and also wastes a lot of class rooms. Based on the verification of student
time. Biometric attendance system has been proposed identification at the entrances system, the RFID tag
in this paper to overcome this limitations. Fingerprint can be embedded in the ID card of the individual. The
attendance system aims to automate the attendance proposed system mainly consists of RFID tag and
management procedure of an educational institution RFID reader and the overall process is controlled by
using biometric technology. This system takes the microcontroller. As soon as the student with valid
attendance electronically with the help of a RFID card comes nearer to the RFID detector,
fingerprint device and the records of the attendance detector will sense the card and collect the necessary
are stored in a database. Microcontroller controls the information present in the card. The information is
whole process and LCD shows the different transmitted wirelessly using GPRS or GSM [8].The
instructions to carry out the process. Index received information is then updated in the respective
impression has been taken as a signature for the student‘s profile on the WEB.
system entry. Besides, the opportunity to choose the
institution departure time helps to ensure proper bus Face recognition based attendance system is a system
scheduling by the transportation department. The that takes the attendance of students for classroom
results showed improved performance over manual lecture[2].The system takes the attendance
attendance management system. In comparison with automatically using face recognition. This system
other related systems, this process has been found to
consists of two kinds of cameras. One is the sensing
be much more flexible, cost effective and secured.
camera on the ceiling to obtain the seats where the
This system may make immense opportunity in
students are sitting. The other is the capturing camera
calculating attendance for developing countries like
in front of the seats to capture images of student‘s
Bangladesh.
face.
Keywords— Automated attendance system, Fingerprint
based, Microcontroller, Bus scheduling. The proposed system comes out to be more effective
and beneficent in compared to other similar devices.
I. INTRODUCTION In fingerprint based attendance system student doesn‘t
Most of the educational institutions are concerned need to carry RFID tags embedded on their IDs, thus,
about student‘s irregular attendance. Truancies can the system is more preferable. Like face recognition
affect student overall academic performance. The based attendance system [3], fingerprint based system
conventional method of taking attendance by calling doesn‘t need continuous observation and recording
names or signing on paper is very time consuming, which is a certain complexity. Besides fingerprint
insecure and inefficient. Besides, remotely located based attendance system is very flexible and cost
institutions face difficulties estimating accurate effective.
number of students to ensure the convenient bus
II. METHODOLOGY
scheduling for transportation purpose. After having
these issues in mind an automatic attendance system The goal of this project is to develop a portable
has been developed which automates the whole classroom attendance system based on fingerprint
process of taking attendance and maintaining it. biometric. To achieve this objective, microcontroller
board Arduino Mega 2560[5] is used as central
processor, Fingerprint scanner (FPS) [6] to scan and

ISBN: 978-984-34- 1
 International Conference on Computer, Communication, Chemical, Materials and Electronic
Engineering
IC4ME2-2017, 26-27 January, 2017

retrieve biometric information from student, SD card

reader to interface between memory storage and
microcontroller Arduino, Real Time Clock (RTC)
module to obtain the current time, date and day for the
fingerprint reader and LCD to display the enrollment
procedure.

The block diagram of proposed design is shown in

figure 1.

Figure 2: Circuit Diagram of the proposed design.

Figure 1: Block Diagram of the proposed design
At the beginning when arduino is powered by a DC
source, LCD & keypad both are activated and LCD
shows instruction for the attendance. Keypad is used
to interact with the instructions. When the ‗*‘ button
from the keypad is pressed the FPS module is
activated. The blue backlight color of FPS module
indicates its activation & the LCD shows instruction
to give fingerprint. Then the FPS takes fingerprints
from students. After receiving the fingerprint the FPS
processes the scanned fingerprint and verifies it with
the templates saved in its own memory. If the
fingerprint is not verified then the process will jump
into its initial stage again. If the fingerprint is verified
then the LCD shows the instruction to choose the
departure period from institution either it is half or
full day. After taking the attendance the entries are
constantly saved into a pre-designed Excel file and
those files are stored in a memory card connected to
microcontroller. As such, the process completes.
III. CIRCUIT DEVELOPMENT
The circuit diagram of the proposed design is
shown in figure 2.
Figure 2 shows the circuit diagram of Fingerprint
based attendance system which consists of Arduino
mega 2560, finger print scanner, Real time clock, 4*4
keypad, 20*4 LCD & sd card reader. The interface of
the FPS is consists of only four pins – power, ground,
serial transmit and serial receive. Here TX pin and RX
pin of FPS is connected to A12 & A13 of arduino
board respectively. The needed connections to
connect a sd card with Arduino AT Mega are: SPI:50
(MISO) to DO; 51 (MOSI) to DI; 52 (SCK) to CLK;
53 (SS) to CS; G to GND and + to 5V and Switch the
switch to 5V for any Arduino running on 5V. Pins of
the sd card module are connected to 50-53 pins of
arduino. the pins of LCD display is connected to
arduino pins as follows : RS to 28; E to 29 & D7-D4
to 30-33. In development of fingerprint based
attendance system SCL and SDA pin of RTC are
connected to 21 & 20 pins of arduino respectively.
Keypad rows are connected to 36-39 and columns are
connected to 40-42 pins of arduino. Lastly the buzzer
is connected to 12th pin of arduino.
Here Fingerprint scanner is connected to
microcontroller by serial communication, the SD card
is connected to by serial peripheral interfacing (SPI),
20*4 LCD display is connected by parallel
communication & RTC is connected by I2C
interfacing.

ISBN: 978-984-34- 2
 International Conference on Computer, Communication, Chemical, Materials and Electronic
Engineering
IC4ME2-2017, 26-27 January, 2017
Figure 3: Flow chart of proposed system
IV. RESULT & DISCUSSION
The system helps to ease the lecturers to keep track of
students‘ attendance. The encryption technique adds
more security and portability saves time. Figure 4
shows prototype of the proposed system.
(a) (b)
Figure 4: Overview of the project a) Overview of
attendance system, b) Overview of Microcontroller
board.
The whole process is controlled by the
microcontroller Audrino that has processed program
which is in C language.
When the microcontroller is interfaced with PC
through USB, the output of the designed system is
ISBN: 978-984-34-
revealed on the serial monitor through the Arduino
software as shown in the given figure 5. Here we can
easily monitor the presence of students on a particular
day simply by typing the specific date.
Figure 5: Serial Monitor output
In Figure 6 we can see that after the enrollment
procedures, the verified ID‘s of students have been
saved in a tabular form into an excel file in
accordance with the current timeline which is
maintained by the RTC. The excel file is saved into a
memory card through the card reader module. This
file can easily be accessed by the respective teachers
simply by connecting the card to PC.
Figure 6: Tabulation of Student‘s attendance
While compared with other similar works this system
has been found more effective such as-
Timesheet attendance tracking system [4] needs
manual entry by the administrator to keep track of the
attendance of pupils. By interfacing the information
insertion module with fingerprint/card readers,
attendance time tracking can be made fully
autonomous. This feature is present in the proposed
automated fingerprint based attendance system. The
face recognition based attendance system is way
complex and quite expensive than fingerprint based
attendance system. In RFID based system, ID has
chances of being stolen or misused. On the other hand
3
 International Conference on Computer, Communication, Chemical, Materials and Electronic
Engineering

fingerprint is a biometric property of individual which Web System WTS‖. Pro. Data Engineering Workshop
cannot be stolen. Iris Recognition Based Attendance (DEWS2005), 1D – d3 (in Japanese).
Management System [9] consisting of hardware and [8] Zatin Singhal and Rajneesh Kumar Gujral ― Anytime
software parts is reliable but on the contrary it also Anywhere- Remote Monitoring of Attendance System based
on RFID using GSM Network‖ International Journal of
increases the manufacturing price than this proposed Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 39– No.3,
system. Attendance System based on RFID using February 2012
GSM Network [8] can be interrupted for any kind of [9] Amena Khatun, A. K. M. Fazlul Haque, Sabbir Ahmed,
Mohammad Mahfujur Rahman, ‖Design and Implementation
fault in GSM network. Speech Biometric Based of Iris Recognition Based Attendance Management System‖
Attendance System [10] can face disturbance if the 2nd Int'l Conf. on Electrical Engineering and Infonnation &
voice recognition doesn‘t match up to satisfactory Communication Technology (ICEEICT) 2015 Jahangirnagar
University, Dhaka-1342, Bangladesh, 21-23 May 2015.
percentage. Fingerprint based attendance system is
[10] Subhadeep Dey, Sujit Barman, Ramesh K. Bhukya, Rohan
free from such hazards. K. Das, Haris B C, S. R. M. Prasanna and R. Sinha ―Speech
Biometric Based Attendance System‖ , Department of
V. CONCLUSION Electronics and Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of
Technology Guwahati Email: fsddey, sujitbarman, r.bhukya,
rohankd, haris, prasanna and rsinhag@iitg.ernet.in
The project is done under close supervision with great
care of circuit designing and assembling. In this paper
design and development of a fingerprint based
attendance system has been developed which helps to
reduce many issues such as, denying the possibilities
of cheating in recording the attendance, helps to ease
the lecturers to keep track of students‘ attendance, the
encryption technique adds more security so there will
be no anonymous fingerprint which is able to tamper
with the recorded data, and the portability saves time
in taking attendance instead of queuing in a line.
Hence a reliable, secure, fast and an efficient system
has been developed replacing a manual and unreliable
system.

REFERENCES

[1] Shoewu, O. and O. Badejo. 2006. ―Radio Frequency

Identification Technology: Development, Application and
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KAKUSHO , Michihiko MINOH ,―Face Recognition-based
Lecture Attendance System‖, Department of Intelligence
Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics,
Kyoto University. Academic Center for Computing and
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[3] Cheng, K., L. Xiang, T. Hirota, and K. Ushijimaa. 2005.
―Effective Teaching for Large Classes with Rental PCs
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[4] K.G.M.S.K. Jayawardana, T.N. Kadurugamuwa, R.G. Rage
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[5] Arduino Microcontroller Guide, W. Durfee, University of
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[7] Cheng, K., L. Xiang, T. Hirota, and K. Ushijimaa. 2005.
―Effective Teaching for Large Classes with Rental PCs by

ISBN: 978-984-34-2030-5 159

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