Biometric-Based Attendance Tracking System for Education Sectors: A Literature Survey on Hardware Requirements

Abstract

The application of biometric recognition in personal authentication enables the growth of this technology to be employed in various domains. The implementation of biometric recognition systems can be based on physical or behavioral characteristics, such as the iris, voice, fingerprint, and face. Currently, the attendance tracking system based on biometric recognition for education sectors is still underutilized, thus providing a good opportunity to carry out interesting research in this area. As evidenced in a typical classroom, educators tend to take the attendance of their students by using conventional methods such as by calling out names or signing off an attendance sheet. Yet, these types of methods are proved to be time consuming and tedious, and sometimes, fraud occurs. As a result, significant progress had been made to mark attendance automatically by making use of biometric recognition. This progress enables a new and more advanced biometric-based attendance system being developed over the past ten years. The setting-up of biometric-based attendance systems requires both software and hardware components. Since the software and hardware sections are too broad to be discussed in one paper, this literature survey only provides an overview of the types of hardware used. Emphasis is then placed on the microcontroller platform, biometric sensor, communication channel, database storage, and other components in order to assist future researchers in designing the hardware part of biometric-based attendance systems.