Android-based Attendance Management System

S. ShanmugaPriya A.Jasmine Mary

Reg No: 950717216335 Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Applications Department of Computer Applications
Francis Xavier Engineering College, Tirunelveli Francis Xavier Engineering College, Tirunelveli
[email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—Until today, most lecturers in universities are found still greener environment. Besides that, the application will help to reduce
using the conventional methods of taking students’ attendance time being wasted, leading to a higher learning productivity in class.
either by calling out the student names or by passing around an There are a few paperless attendance systems that have been
attendance sheet for students to sign confirming their presence. In developed but such systems need to be equipped with either a
addition to the time-consuming issue, such method is also at higher computer or RFID reader, resulting in additional cost for hardware
risk of having students cheating about their attendance, especially and its maintenance. With that in mind, we have aimed to address this
in a large classroom. Therefore a method of taking attendance by issue by having a system with minimal hardware requirement and at
employing an application running on the Android platform is the same time, enhancing the mobility aspect of the existing
proposed in this paper. This application, once installed can be used attendance systems.
to download the students list from a designated web server. Based
on the downloaded list of students, the device will then act like a II. RELATEDWORK
scanner to scan each of the student cards one by one to confirm In this section, we review a few related systems and their
and verify the student’s presence. The device’s camera will be used different methods in recording students’ attendance. An RFID- based
as a sensor that will read the barcode printed on the students’ system [1] is developed to record students attendance during class
cards. The updated attendance list is then uploaded to an online hour as the students enter the class. This system requires each
database and can also be saved as a file to be transferred to a PC classroom to be installed with an RFID reader that is connected to a
later on. This system will help to eliminate the current problems, computer. The RFID reader will be used to capture the student
while also promoting a paperless environment at the same time. information through the student’s card. To view the overall student
Since this application can be deployed on lecturers’ own existing attendance, the lecturer may later connect their phone via Bluetooth
Android devices, no additional hardware cost isrequired. to the computer. Another project [2] is also using RFID technology.
However, this system requires an RFID reader to be mounted at the
Index Terms— attendance system, android application. central of each classroom. The mounted RFID reader will track all
RFID tags in the classroom at once and an object counter will update
I. INTRODUCTION the number of students in the classroom based on the successfully
In most educational institutions, participation of students in traced tags.
learning process is regarded as a vital exercise for allowing Both systems described earlier have the same limitation, which is
knowledge transfer. This signifies the importance of having students the additional hardware cost to install the RFID devices. Even though
to attend the scheduled lectures and classes. Conventional methods RFID devices have become cheaperover the time, one whole RFID
for recording students attendance are still adopted by most colleges. system does not just include readers and tags. Computer, cables,
One common method is by network or even a server might be needed in order to setup the whole
havingstudentstomanuallysigntheattendancesheet,whichis infrastructure. The cost to setup the system from scratch can easily
typicallypassedaroundtheclassroomwhilealecturerisgiving the lecture. outweigh the cost of the RFID devices used in thesystem.
This approach could undoubtedly allow the students to cheat about An alternative approach was introduced in [3], where the system
their attendance, where a student may promotes fingerprint based students’ attendance recording system
signforanabsentstudent.Besides,suchattendancesheetcould easily be with GSM utilization. By using this system, each student attendance
misplaced orlost. is validated once the student’s fingerprint is verified by the reader. In
A stricter approach especially to prevent students cheating about addition to the strict attendance verification and recording, the system
their attendance is additionally tedious, where a lecturer calls out the will send weekly attendance report to the students’ guardians via
individual names from the students list and validate the presence of GSM. In another biometric-based system, [4] presents a remote iris
every single student. Such manual methods of taking students acknowledgment attendance administration system, which is planned
attendance have been proven to be difficult and time consuming. and actualized using the Daugman's calculation [5]. This system
Thus, there is a need for a semi- automated system that would utilizes the iris acknowledgment for confirmation
eliminate all of these troubles.
Therefore, it is our objectives to develop a portable
attendancesystemequippedwithanonlinedatabase,especially
topreventdatalossaswellastopromotepaperlessanda
and RF wireless techniques, especially for employee identification. consists of an online server with database and the Android- based
Both of these systems are utilizing biometrics qualities which make application and its hardware part as the client.
them great approach against fake data.
The obvious limitation of such biometrics basedattendance
systemisthattheycostalotmoreexpensivethanapureRFID- based
system. The attendance recording process in these systems would
also be time consuming due to the fact that
biometricscanwouldnormallytakeawhileforrecognitionand validation
process. In spite of this, we do not deny the
importanceofsuchsystemsinhighlysecuredenvironment.

III. METHODOLOGY
This section presents the sequence of activities performed
towards the completion of the system. The development work of the
system follows the normal software development
lifecycle,wherepriortotherealimplementationwork,detailed
designsofthesystemwerecompletedfirst.Thesearedescribed in the
followingsub-section.
A. SystemRequirements
Figure 1. System architectural diagram
Thesystemweareintroducinginthispaperaimstoaddress the issues
of capturing students attendance in class through the use of an
1) SoftwareArchitecture:
Android-based attendance management application. With the
The online database plays an important role in the system as
expectation that most lecturers already owned an Android device, the
without it, the user authentication will fail along with the data
adoption of this proposed system will definitely cut down the cost of
extraction process. The database is composed of a number of tables,
hardware and its maintenance. IncontrastwithRFID-
which are used to store different groups of records required to
basedsystems,thissystemrequiresvery minimal setup. Besides,
managed the student attendance data. Basically there are four
Android devices are normally small, light and portable, which allows
relational tables specifically named as; ‘groups’, ‘lecturer’, ‘courses’
them to be used anywhereand at anytime withease.
and ‘students’. The ‘lecturer’ table stores the staff’s information such
With the vision of an end product in mind, we started the first
as the staff username, password and name, while ‘courses’ table
step into the system development by listing the features to be
stores the details of available courses. As shown in Figure 2, the
provided by the application. To use the application, a lecturer will
primary key of ‘courses’ and ‘lecturer’ table are inserted into ‘groups’
first need to install the apk file on their Android device. Once the
table as foreign key. The same goes for ‘students’ table, the foreign
application is started, the lecturer will needto log in onto the
key refers to the id from ‘groups’.
application by supplying their user id and password. Upon a
successful authentication, the user will then be redirected to another
page that prompts them to select the course code and student group to
bemonitored.
The list of students registered in the selected group will be
downloaded into the Android device from an online database server.
Based on the downloaded list of students, the application can then be
used to check student attendance by utilizing the device’s camera to
capture and scan the barcode printed on the student card. Such
barcode label represents the unique student ID of a student. Thus the
capturing of students attendance will be done by having the students
to flash their cards one by one at the lecturer’s Android device. Once
all studentshaverecordedtheirattendance,theupdatedattendance list can
then be uploaded by the lecturer back to the online database server or
transferred as a file to a PC by means of Bluetooth or USBlink.
Figure 2. Table’s relation diagram
B. SystemDesign
The Android based Attendance Management System is designed The online web server can be deployed on a computer, which is
based on the client-server framework. By referring to the system connected to the Internet. To allow public access, the server should
architectural diagram (see Figure 1), the system be configured with a public IP address. This server will be receiving
requests from the client applications that are running on the Android
devices, which also require Internet access, especially when
downloading list of students from the server and when uploading
updated attendance records uploaded to the server or saved as a file to
be transferred to a PC.
 START

Install Application .apk

Initialize Barcode Scanner

Lecturer Login Interface

No Scan & recognizebarcode

Login
successful?

Yes Match recognized student ID withIDs

from the active studentlist
Interface: Show list of courses and student groups
registered for the lecturer

No

Lecturer choose course & student group

Match found?
to take attendance

Yes

Interface: Show list of students Matching student ID’s

attendance is checked and
timestamped
No
Click Scan Yes
button? Scan for the
next barcode?
Yes
No

A
Save attendance list in a file

Figure 3. Flowchart: Student list activation for attendance

END
recording

2) User NavigationDesign: Figure 4. Barcode scanning flowchart

According to the flow chart (refer to Figure 3), the application
needs to be installed first on the user’s Android- based device. Once 3)HardwareArchitecture:
launched, the application will take the user to the login page. Upon a The basic requirement to deploy the system is a computer to run the
successful login authentication, the user is taken to a page to choose online database server and a device with camera that supports
their registered teaching course and class (student group) from the Android 2.2 or higher versions for running the client application.
drop down list. Once all required inputs are filled in, a list of Another optional requirement is a personal computer to retrieve the
students’ names for the respective class will be downloaded into the attendance list file.
device.
Every time a class starts and the lecturer is ready to record C. SystemImplementation
students attendance, a start button should be clicked to activate
thescannerapplication.Thescannerapplicationwillbeopened and ready The development work for this project consists of two parts,
to use the phone’s camera to detect and capture the barcode, printed which are the development of the online database server and the
on the student’s card (see Figure 4). The captured student ID (from Android application itself. For development of the Android
the barcode) will be matched with the student IDs from the student application, the design works involve designing the Graphical User
list. A matching student ID will then be marked with the current Interface (GUI) required for displaying information, capturing user
timestamp as the attendancevalidation. inputs and integration with Zxing barcode scanner (refer to Figure 5),
This scanning process will keep repeating, in which case the especially to support barcode scanning process.
camera will scan and validate barcode from each and every students’ This attendance management system uses student’s unique
cards one by one until there are no more cards left to scan. Lastly, the identification number, which is captured from the scanned barcode
updated students attendance list can then be for attendance validation purpose. The barcode scanning process is
supported by the ZXinglibrary,
which is integrated into the application. To create and manage the
online database, basic SQL knowledge is needed. The online server
application being employed is the Xampp server, which includes
MySQL database as one of the components. As for the client-side,
SQLite library is used to manage a local database running on the
Android device; i.e. used to store the downloaded and updated
studentlist.

START

Figure 6. Frontinterface

Develop Online DB Develop Android

Application Engine

Integration Develop Android

Application
Interface

App integration with Figure 7. Logininterface

Zxing barcode
Testing scanner

END

Figure 5. Flow of development activities Figure 8. Courses-group list interface

IV. RESULTS ANDDISCUSSION

By following the design proposed in the previous section, the
server-side and the client-side applications were successfully
implemented. Having a system to capture and store students
attendance records online promotes a paperless attendance record and
a greener environment. The portability and mobility aspect of the
application is also emphasized in this current system since each
Figure 9. Student list interface
lecturer only requires an Android device to run the application.
Figure 10 shows the integrated third party barcode scanner
A. Flow of activities on Android: Snapshots of the Graphical User
initialization when the ‘scan’ button is clicked. The camera view is
Interface (GUI)
shown, ready to capture the barcode (printed on the student card).
The following snapshots (Figure 6-11) illustrate the attendance – Figure 11 shows the updated students’ name list which have been
recording process based on the flowchart as in Figure 3. Figure 6 time stamped for attendance validation.
shows the default front interface once the application is launched.
Figure 7 shows the login form where the user (lecturer) needs to enter
their username and password. Upon a successful login process, the
lecturer will be taken to the next interface (see Figure 8) where the
lecturer’s name is displayed along with a list of their respective
courses and groups (class). Figure 9 shows the successfully
downloaded students’ name list from the online database.

Figure 10. Barcode (Student ID) scanning

process
 [5] PrateekVerma, MaheedharDubey, Praveen Verma and
SomakBasu, "Daughman’s Algorithm Method For Iris
Recognition-A Biometric Approach", in International Journal of
Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering, ISSN 2250-
2459, Volume 2, Issue 6, June2012.
[6] ZaritaZainuddin, Ong Pauline, "Function Approximation Using
Artificial Neural Networks", in International Journal of Systems
Figure 11. Updated student attendance list with timestamp Applications, Engineering & Development, Issue 4, Volume 1,
2007

V. CONCLUSION
In recording student attendance, conventional methods are still
adopted in some institutions, where the instructors call out the student
names one by one or by taking signature from each student to
determine their presence. Nowadays, better methods are also
employed, i.e. by relying on a system to record the attendance of
students in semi-auto manner, e.g. RFID or biometrics based systems.
Such systems are absolutely excellent as a solution to existing
problems, but one obvious drawback is the additional cost of
hardware and maintenance.
Hence, it was our target to develop an attendance system that will
require minimal hardware cost, setup and maintenance. i.e. by having
the application to run on the instructor’s existing Android mobile
device. Besides that, to prevent data loss, an online database will be
used especially to store the recorded students attendance. The system
was successfully developed by following the client-server
framework. A complete design of the system was created first,
followed by the actual implementation of the system both on the
server and Android device. The development was finalized with the
system testing on the overall system.

ACKNOWLEDGMNT
We would like to extend our acknowledgement to
UniversitiTeknologi MARA (UiTM) and to those who have directly
and indirectly contributed to our project. This research is funded by
the Fundamental Research Grants Scheme Research, Ministry of
Higher Education Malaysia (FRGS/1/2014/TK03/UITM/02/14).

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