Design and Implementation of Fingerprint Based Attendance Management System for Tertiary Institutions

1.0 Introduction
The implementation of the biometric based attendance system constrained by our scope and objectives was successfully achieved using the waterfall approach through the help of my supervisor and expert advice. We built a handheld device which was controlled by the ATMega1284p microcontroller, the program for the microcontroller was written in embedded programming. An Application software (backs up the attendance in database) which was built using python3 programming language in atom editor using MySQL as the database management system. It was indeed a challenging project and we believe it will enhance the education standard of not only Electronics and computer engineering but also at various Universities for properly maintained and utilized.

1.1 Background of the study
The recent attendance System in institutions has proved to have failed to achieve its major purpose which was to ensure that the right statistics of students that attended the class can be taken. The major reason for its failure among its short-comings is the ability for a student to sign in for another student. Many educational institutions are trying to identify accurate, safe, and reliable techniques to protect access rights to their existing services or operation. Finger print based attendance system is an answer to these concerns.
Biometrics, especially in information technology, encompasses methods to analyze physical and behavioral identities to extract unique features for identification or monitoring purposes. Various physical features including faces, eyes, fingers, hands, veins, ears and teeth can be used by this technology, and characteristics such as gaits or voice patterns are still being investigated and analyzed as part of the wider biometrics field. Biometrics offers secure methods of access to sensitive services and obviates the need to carry a token, card, remember several passwords. Biometric techniques also reduce the risk of lost, forgotten or copied passwords, stolen tokens or over the shoulder attacks, yet despite all this obvious advantages there is still one major reasons why it has not been implemented in many organizations which is that the biometric technique is expensive and the level of standardization differs within systems, numerous health hazards, requirement for a specialist analytical software and availability of machines with the computing power to run it. Fingerprint identification is one of the most well-known and common Biometric identification system, Because of their uniqueness and consistency over time, finger print has been used for identification for many years, more recently becoming automated due to advancement in computing capabilities. The fingerprint system seems to be the most cost effective and easy to use among all of the biometric system with no health side effects.