Engineering Projects/Attendance/Howard Community College/Spring2012/vd

Problem Statement
Our goal is to create a program that uses images scanned from a webcam to track the attendance of students coming into the Engineering room.

Team Members
Allenad

touelia

Summary
Our first goal for the project was to learn how to use the software Yawcam and Picasa. After watching tutorials on the programs we decided to split the project into two, one member would work on the webcam and the other would work with the face recognition software. Installing and setting up the webcam was fairly simple, but the settings proved to be the big issue. We needed to adjust the settings just right so it wouldn't take too few or too much pictures whenever it captured a motion. Once we decided on the adjustment we wanted, we set up the webcam in the engineering room to collect as much image data as we can get before moving on to the software section. After our first test, the images were not very good, so we had to adjust the camera location and angle. We placed the camera at the front of the room and mounted it to the wall. We then decided to keep testing the camera to find the right placement for the camera location. Once we find the best location, we plan on shifting our focus to the face recognition software.

Story
For this project we decided to split the project into to parts, one member will test the camera and the other will test the face recognition software. For the webcam, we used the YawCam software and a generic webcam provided to us by our professor. For the face recognition, we used Picasa. We also tested several Webcam programs to make sure we had a user friendly program. The only one that work fairly well was iSPY, but we ran into an issue where only one camera would work at a time, so we decided that we should stick to YawCam to avoid getting side tracked. To test the webcam, we placed it at different locations throughout the engineering room and left it to take pictures for a day. We then went back everyday to make adjusts depending on the outcome. If the camera took to few pictures, we adjusted the capture image rate and lower the sensitivity of the camera. If the camera wasn't in the right angle, we moved it to a new location. The first location pointed direct at the door, but it only captured one side of the face. The second location was at a 45 degree angle from the door, but we had to move it because too many people were using the area so we couldn't get a good shot of people entering the room. We then decided to mount the camera to a wall mount and place it in the front of the room pointing down towards the front door. This way we would be free of any obstructions and we would have a good angle on the door. Because it took so long for use to get any pictures, we did get to use Picasa very much ad it will most likely be the next step for the project to move forward.

Decision List
For this project we decided to split the project into two parts. One member worked on the webcam setup and the other member worked on the face recognition software.

Material List
Generic Webcam

Software List
Picasa

Yawcam

Time
34 Hours

Tutorials
YawCam Tutorial

YawCam Tutorial 2

YawCam Tutorial 3

Picasa Tutorial

Next Steps
The next steps for this program will be to get Picasa to recognizes faces, store them into a database, and design a program to take the data from Picasa to take attendance.