Computer Vision for Attendance and Emotion Analysis in School Settings

This paper presents facial detection and emotion analysis software developed by and for secondary students and teachers. The goal is to provide a tool that reduces the time teachers spend taking attendance while also collecting data that improves teaching practices. Disturbing current trends regarding school shootings motivated the inclusion of emotion recognition so that teachers are able to better monitor students’ emotional states over time. This will be accomplished by providing teachers with early warning notifications when a student significantly deviates in a negative way from their characteristic emotional profile. This project was designed to save teachers time, help teachers better address student mental health needs, and motivate students and teachers to learn more computer science, computer vision, and machine learning as they use and modify the code in their own classrooms. Important takeaways from initial test results are that increasing training images increases the accuracy of the recognition software, and the farther away a face is from the camera, the higher the chances are that the face will be incorrectly recognized. The software tool is available for download at https://github.com/ferrabacus/Digital-Class.