UPASTHITI - The Real Checker

This blog narrates an incident of me along with my friends Maaz Bin Asad and Apoorve Goyal finding an amazing idea during a general conversation. We decided to implement it further and I am glad we did it. We received an amazing response from our mentors and it was all worth it. Recently Computer Science Department of our college organized hack - AMU Hacks 1.0. We decided to team up and give shape to our idea. We called it UPASTHITI - THE REAL CHECKER

UPASTHITI means being present/available. Due to the pandemic, most of the things in life went virtual. Our classes were happening virtually. We noticed there was no means for a teacher to check the attention of students towards classes. Most of them were attending but with closed eyes and no voice at all. UPASTHITI was all around this problem.

Let’s see how it works and the tech we used!

A light-weight Face Attendance System( Developed using FLASK, TensorFlow, KERAS-VGGFACE API, MTCNN and, CSVs), with bandwidth checking and reporting capability. The host(or a Teacher) can generate a temporary link for the employees(or students), to mark attendance. The site will first make a check for required bandwidth and if it is above the threshold, the user will be prompted to enter his/her name, after which their camera will turn on for 10 seconds and the photo is captured, matched with the name and image at the backend. If a match is found, the user’s status is marked PRESENT in a CSV file, else if there is some network error(after max tries), the matter is reported in the CSV automatically.

We are currently working on improving it with a Liveliness Detector to distinguish between Real and Fake Identities, and also improving the processing, by integrating APIs and SQLite database.

The time factor is something that will allow instructors to keep a check on attentiveness and it is easy to use as it will be an automated process. The task for the instructor is to share the link. Other details will be marked.

Presenting the idea was the most important thing that we all learned during this project. As it was a short sprint hack, it was necessary from our side to convey the idea properly to mentors.

We had a wonderful collaboration as a team. Due to different commitments, we couldn’t discuss our stuff during normal hours. I remember all of us waking up early at 5 AM to discuss this project and working till 7 AM for about a week. All of us did multiple things for the very first time and it was all done perfectly.

At last, UPASTHITI shined! We are improving it and soon it will come out better! We earned a special spot in TOP 10 teams.

The thing that mattered to me the most is bringing a product that can be actually helpful !

Let’s see what life throws next !