Recognizing Students and Detecting Student Engagement with Real-Time Image Processing

Abstract

With COVID-19, formal education was interrupted in all countries and the importance of distance learning has increased. It is possible to teach any lesson with various communication tools but it is difficult to know how far this lesson reaches to the students. In this study, it is aimed to monitor the students in a classroom or in front of the computer with a camera in real time, recognizing their faces, their head poses, and scoring their distraction to detect student engagement based on their head poses and Eye Aspect Ratios. Distraction was determined by associating the students’ attention with looking at the teacher or the camera in the right direction. The success of the face recognition and head pose estimation was tested by using the UPNA Head Pose Database and, as a result of the conducted tests, the most successful result in face recognition was obtained with the Local Binary Patterns method with a 98.95% recognition rate. In the classification of student engagement as Engaged and Not Engaged, support vector machine gave results with 72.4% accuracy. The developed system will be used to recognize and monitor students in the classroom or in front of the computer, and to determine the course flow autonomously.