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. [25].

Fingerprint authentication has been verified through various applications. In 1924, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is already known to have maintained more than 250 million civil files of fingerprints for the purpose of criminal investigation and the identification of unknown casualties. It now is being used in numerous field including financial, medical, e-commerce and customer application as a secure and effective authentication method [l].

1.2 Problem statement

Survey and analysis of the current attendance methods has shown that the majority of lecturers use a paper-based attendance method to keep attendance in Nnamdi Azikiwe University.

Problems that have been discovered with the paper-based registers are  

Paper based registers are not uploaded to a centralized system, so the data is lost for analysis.

Time Taken for data collection impacts on lecturing time.

The system can be fooled by students’ buddy-signing in other to ensure that their friends scale through the 75% attendance benchmark.

Consequently, this project proposes Fingerprint recognition as a method to overcome these problems in Nnamdi Azikiwe University.