SmartGate: A Biometric Access Control and Attendance System

Abstract
The importance of attendance in any organization cannot be overstated. Attendance in many organizations, college and schools are paper-based which makes taking attendance daily both exhausting and time- consuming. There are a couple of issues with security for such existing system as many security resource persons are required for an organization having a large number of employee and visitors. For offices with restricted access, most organizations use automatic doors with smart I.D. cards to grant access to authorized staff. However, there are problems associated with the use of I.D. cards some of which are: Staff can easily misplace I.D. card, I.D. cards can get bad and keep authorized personnel stranded, unauthorized persons can easily steal the card of an authorized staff to gain access and unnecessary cost of issuing new identity card after an expired duration. There are many technologies that provide support in solving this issue using either OR code, visual recognition technology, Computer Vision, Internet of Things (IOT) combine with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and microcontrollers. This paper presents the design of an automatic access control and attendance system using biometric authentication (both fingerprint and facial recognition) system. This system verifies authorized staff, while access control at the gate (entrance) is established, the facial recognition system is used to detect if the person at the gate is a staff or not. After verification, the staff can then login (or logout) and open the gate using the fingerprint machine. The system also makes a report of attendance with date and time which is automatically updated in the database. The gate access control is achieved using Arduino microcontroller while the database is program in c and MySQL.