In a day and age where contact-less is considered the new normal, numerous have to come up with a novel way around what was once regarded as routine. In fact, humanity was forced to abandon the conventional and go the digital way without a warning. However, with schools and offices reopening, the biometric attendance system was perhaps the most feared of all digital developments. But Kartikeya Bharadwaj, an alumnus of Mahindra University, paved his way for a viable solution.

"When the offices began reopening a few months ago, my father told me that the fingerprint biometric system at his office was not being used. In fact, The Central government also suspended the use of touch-based biometric systems in all the government offices across the country," Kartikeya told The Bridge Chronicle. "That is probably what made me realise that there will be a huge surge in the demand for 'Touchless' Attendance Systems in the coming days," he added.

What does Chakshu Face Attendance system do?

The app, which is primarily a Touchless Employee Attendance App, allows an organisation clock attendance through an android device (phone or a tablet), using face recognition. Speaking about its conception, Kartikeya mentioned how the job was a tough one, but it fell through for him eventually. "I had raspberry-pi lying around on my desk and I thought of building a basic face recognition attendance prototype on it," he said. "I quickly wrote a script and hooked a webcam to the pi. The prototype was slow, but it did the job and it was touchless. This got me thinking of taking this project seriously and building a scalable solution," he stated.

Speaking about his limitations, Kartikeya also remarked how it was a challenging undertaking. "Running AI algorithms at scale is a difficult task and initially, it was challenging for us to get it up and running smoothly, but we figured out how to do it eventually," he mentioned.

Going global

Kartikeya plans to escalate this app to a global pedestal, and work is underway for the same. "We are figuring out the major pain-points faced by organisations that could be solved through the app," he declared. "We are doing amazing research in the field of face biometrics and have a couple of related products down the pipeline," he added.

And while the COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on people around the globe, Kartikeya wishes to encourage budding app-developers to take the leap. "Aspiring app developers should work on building the prototype of their idea as quickly as possible," he recommended. "Make sure you spend all your efforts in making this prototype work and launch it quickly in the market to see if your idea has potential or not. This exercise helped us a lot in validating our product idea," he stated.

Features of Chakshu Face Attendance system:

● Absolutely Touchless

● Runs on low-cost android tablets/phones

● State of the art accuracy

● Anti-Spoofing

● Cost-Effective

● User-Friendly App