Meerkat: A framework for developing presence monitoring software based on face recognition

Presence monitoring is the feature that recognizes presence of a person or persons automatically. It improves upon both manual and automatic presence verification process by allowing unobtrusive and continuous monitoring rather than performing a discrete check at the beginning and/or at the end of the participation period. The software with presence monitoring capability is particularly useful in today's higher education settings where various soft skills must be continuously developed, monitored and assessed. This paper proposes a framework-called Meerkat-for developing presence monitoring software. The framework relies on the face recognition technology from Microsoft Cognitive Services as a convenient tool to produce web-based APIs that can easily be used to develop web applications for presence monitoring. In a case study, an application has been developed as a proof of concept to confirm the integration between the presence monitoring feature and the Face API of Microsoft Cognitive Services. Furthermore, to evaluate the performance of the application, an error analysis on this application has been carried out that shows a satisfactory performance. As Meerkat is based on face recognition which extends the Microsoft Cognitive Services, the results confirm that most of the errors highly correlate with the image quality and the posture of the faces.