Engineering Projects/Attendance/Howard Community College/fall2012/p2-503-zts

Problem Statement
To take attendance using facial recognition.

Team Members
Taylor Zeher Thiam

Summary
For the facial recognition we had to focus on the different soft wares that was available. We first used the visual control that wasn't able to take motion detection pictures as we wanted them to. We then shifted our attention to the Yaw cam. With the Yaw cam we were able to take motion detection pictures and capture pictures to save on Picasa. Picasa was able to recognition individual faces in the pictures to be able to use it as an attendance.

Story
We downloaded both the Yawcam and the visual control to out its functions. We found that the visual control did not work good enough for what we need to accomplish so we turned to Picasa for the facial recognition. We focused on the Yawcam and set it to automatically take pictures of students as they walk into the classroom. Then we viewed the pictures in Picasa. The pictures in Picasa recognized the faces that were being shown in the picture. We made a stand to hold the webcam to allow people to take pictures when they are entering the classroom. We tested Yawcam and Picasa together and found that if a about ten previous pictures are taken of a student Picasa will automatically detect the person and add a suggestion for that person making their name bold. To take attendance you will have to see whose name becomes bold in Picasa. We looked into exporting Picasa's facial recogonition information automatically using custom buttons in picasa such as Export to Cvs or through Picasa's database (Picasa.ini and .pmp files). Finally we created a batch file that can be run automatically in windows scheduled tasks to clear out excess pictures taken by Yawcam's motion detection.

Decision List
List all formal decisions made with links to their documentation such as a decision tree or decision matrix.

Material List
Webcam-borrowed Wood-bought

Software List
Picasa

Yawcam

Time
40 hours.

Tutorials
YawCam Tutorial

YawCam Tutorial 2

Picasa Tutorial

Create a batch file as scheduled task tutorial

Next Steps
Setup the camera to take pictures as students are entering the class.

Explore exporting facial recognition information from Picasa to attendance spreadsheet automatically.

Add on to the stand for camera. Either fix the height at which the camera stands or just make the stand more define then what it is now.