A Virtual Proctor with Biometric Authentication for Facilitating Distance Education

The lack of efficient and reliable proctoring for tests, examinations and laboratory exercises is slowing down the adoption of distance education. At present, the most popular solution is to arrange for proctors to supervise the students through a surveillance camera system. This method exhibits two shortcomings. The cost for setting up the surveillance system is high and the proctoring process is laborious and tedious. In order to overcome these shortcomings, some proctoring software that identifies and monitors student behavior during educational activities has been developed. However, these software solutions exhibit certain limitations: (i) They impose more severe restrictions on the students than a human proctor would. The students have to sit upright and remain directly in front of their webcams at all times. (ii) The reliability of these software systems highly depends on the initial conditions under which the educational activity is started. For example, changes in the lighting conditions can cause erroneous results.