Automation application in education and training Nguyen Viet Huong, Pham Doan Tinh, Duong Ba Hong Minh, Dang Minh Khang, Nguyen Xuan Binh, Nguyen Hoai Nam, Pham Thi Hong Ha, Pham Hung Manh, Do Phan Cam Thach, Le Hai Binh, Nguyen Thai Son. Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications - Hanoi University of Technology Hanoi, Vietnam [email protected]

[email protected] Abstract - New advances in biometrics based identifications as well as new method of biometric features capturing allow us to combine them to make our real world automation system. The most popular method is the Fingerprint identification. In this paper, we focus on introducing the technology used in this method as well as the designing and implementing a new system that applies this method to use in training centers and universities to automate the progress of study and training. The target system has capabilities of preparing the time table schedules, controlling the students’ and lecturers’ as well as instructors’ time attendance, and making statistical reports to help the managers easily manage the study progress effectively. The system can also be applied in multi-classrooms connected in a network. We named this system “ACTAS”. Keywords-Fingerprint; implementation; ACTAS

Identification;

automation;

design;

I. INTRODUCTION Today the automation application in education and training is a very popular trend in the world. Most of European countries as well as many Southeast Asian developed countries have applied automation in many fields of social, economic, and political life. In reality, it has brought many advantages and recognized by all of us. In Vietnam, automation has been applied for a long time. However, due to the economic condition, it hasn’t been widening. In such context, we would like to introduce a product called Automatic Controlling Teaching and Scheduling (ACTAS), which successfully applied automatic control in education and training.

rules of education ministry and rules of the training center itself, and other additional information which strongly supports the managing process. A. Overview The system is designed to meet the demands on training, to provide students or teachers’ information. The system also assists the training management at Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications, Hanoi University of Technology. The system includes two main parts. The first one is the mechanical system that contains an automation gate system and two bolts controlled by two stepper motors (executive mechanism), infrared system providing signals about the presence of controlled objects, identifying the cycles of entering or exiting of teachers and students; and electronic circuit board communicating with a PC installed control software. The second part is the software system that communicates with hardware system and manages specific teaching or studying periods as well as communicates with a central database. The structure and the size of the mechanical gate system as well as the way which organizes LED transmits or receives are described in figure 1.

ACTAS includes two parts. One part concerns with the automatic gate system controlled by the second part. The second part concerns with the controlling and managing software. The software system is developed based on the fingerprint identification and fingerprint database of teachers and students according to the time schedule stored in the system’s database. Based on the data about time attendance of the students, teachers and technical staffs in theoretical and practical hours, the system can produce reports to show students who are allowed or not allowed to take part in exams according to the

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Figure 1: Diagram of the mechanical system when looking upside down

The mechanical system has some major parts: •

The mechanical gate with the some features such as automatic middle balance depending on spring systems; bolt system including two bolts which are designed on both sides of the door and controlled by stepper motors. It controls the direction of the door.

•

The infrared sensor part includes 8 pairs of LED arranged along the corridor which control, identify cycles of entering or exiting of teachers and students.

•

The function of the control electrical circuit system is to transfer infrared (IF) signals to the software system and receive the control signals from the software system to control stepper motors, then operate a suitable bolt.

The fingerprint capture equipment is FUS200 of Silex Company (Japan). Control circuit uses micro controller unit 8051, executive mechanism containing two stepper motors and two control bolts, which is corresponding to the opening direction (described in detail at part of operational system). Warning Module uses a pairs of infrared IC: PT2248 and PT2249. Database Module uses SQL Server 2000. Developmental application software program uses .NET technology.

B. Technology 1) Fingerprint identification technology The key problem in fingerprint identification is the fingerprint matching. So we will briefly introduce the method used in fingerprint matching today. First of all, we must capture the fingerprint of the controlled objects. There are many methods but the most popular ones are swipe-sensors and surface-touch sensors. Both of them may use the capacitive or thermal method to capture the features of the fingerprints. Besides that there may be other methods such as optical, pressure, radio, static or scanned image, micro-electro-mechanical. Most of the sensors combine the detection and data conversion circuitry in a single chip. After having fingerprint image in hand we can do further processing such as image enhancement, ridge extraction, binarization, thinning, minutiae detection, then these special minutiae are used in further processing. Now we will introduce an overview of the algorithm used in most Fingerprint Identification software today.

The overview of the cubic diagram described in Figure2.

Figure 3. Fingerprint Minutiae

Minutiae are the terminations and bifurcations of ridge lines in a fingerprint image as described in figure 3. And the approach towards fingerprint recognition is to match the distribution and orientation of such points.

Figure 2: Overall cubic diagram of the system

The final result of the fingerprint image processing is the minutiae skeleton, this is a set of distances between ridge bifurcating and ridge ending minutiae as well as distribution and orientation of minutiae as described in figure 4 (sometimes we call it “fingerprint template”).

Why we choose fingerprint identification method? And the simple answer is that this is a very high-secured method. Students and lecturers don’t worry about forgetting to carry their ID cards. The next section we will introduce more detail about this technology.

Figure 4. Minutiae skeleton

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Figure 5 describes the process of fingerprint matching process.

students registers two fingerprint templates of two fingers. Each finger is captured twice in order improve the reliability of the saved fingerprint. Control: manage list of teachers, students joining in each period for all classrooms. The main function of this module is to control executive mechanism depending on comparing captured fingerprint with the fingerprints saved in database. Beside, this module saves automatically the specific time when teachers or students enter or exit to provide data for different kinds of report.

Figure 5. Fingerprint matching process In our system, fingerprint database stores the fingerprint templates of all students, lecturers, technical staffs. In our system, we use some open source software as well as other freeware to ease the development of our practical system. In the future, we intend to develop our own software based on famous algorithm and burn them into embedded computers so that we may approach to the commercial mobility version of our system. 2) .NET technology .NET is a new technology of Microsoft with many advantages: support to Unicode, Oriented Programming Language Modem through multi-program languages that makes it easy to approach and develop application based on .NET technology. .NET technology increases considerably growth rate of applications, especially the applications in management system. C. Main software’s functions Manage Account Information: provide, delete, and decentralize to accounts Manage Training information: manage information of universities, centers, and training units; manage courses, faculties, manage classrooms and subjects at centers; manage credit-based class and centered class. Manage students’ information: manage list of subjects for credit-studied students and center – studied students. Manage teachers’ information, list of subjects taught by teachers, faculties which teachers are belong to. Manage schedule: allow inputting schedule at the beginning of each term of the academic year, looking for missed periods and arranging other periods for these ones. Manage studying plan and studying system time to give out data based on the inputted schedule to help the controller module to control exactly mechanical system as well as to record teaching and studying attendance process. Register fingerprints: allow registering, modifying teachers’ and students’ fingerprints. Each of teachers or

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Beside the above function, the system gives many kinds of statistical reports about students, teachers and schedule serving for management; give out the list of students allowed or not allowed taking part in exam that serves for ASTMM system. II. DESCRIPTION A. Register fingerprint The registration process is controlled by the computer software in cooperation with capture fingerprint device FUS200. When receiving a command from PC, the capture fingerprint device is switched on until the finger is put on the machine, at that time the image of the fingerprint will be transferred to PC under bitmap and is immediately processed by the software to become template and saved in database, after a short time if no finger is put on the machine, it will automatically change to timeout status. To ensure the accuracy of the registration and future identification process, each person must register two fingerprints, each fingerprint before saved in database must be checked through two steps, first the quality of fingerprint bitmap must be higher than the known threshold set by the software, and second each fingerprint must experience the comparison process with the fingerprint of the finger. If the two steps are ensured, the template of the fingerprint is saved in database. B. Operation of the system To operate the system, first the manager must add enough education information, student and teacher information into the system. At the same time, at early each term, the manager is responsible for adding timetable information of each class into the system. Each classroom always has one computer connected with the network of the center of the university. This computer is supplied an IP address in the network. At each day, each moment, one classroom will have some lectures saved in the timetable database of the system. Basing on the IP address of the computer, the time of each lecture and the current time, the program will define the correlative timetable and load the whole information and fingerprints of teachers and students who can take part in that timetable.

Basing on the list of fingerprints allowed to take part in the current timetable, the system will compare with fingerprints of teachers, students taking part in teaching and studying. When a teacher or a student is allowed to take part in teaching and studying, the system will open the door and at the same time save the time that the teacher or the student exiting or entering the classroom into the database for generating the reports attendance reports. The opening of the door is actually the control of one of two bolts controlled by the step engine at two door edges. The process of entering the classroom is shown in the figure 3. When a person wants to enter the classroom, he or she will cover the Infrared signal line 1 or line 2. When the system receives the IF signal, it will define the current position of the person who is going to enter the room. The fingerprint machine is switched on until the finger is put on, the finger image will be transferred to PC for checking. If the system cannot identify any fingerprints in the list of fingerprints of teachers, students taking part in the current timetable same with the fingerprints of the person who have just been captured, the system will give the warning signal, that is a red LED above the circle pillar c2. On the contrary, the system will give the warning signal of a green LED, and control bolt K1 so that the user can push the door to enter the room. After the user passes LED line 5, the system will record a successful entering process. Line 5 In Room

Line 4 c1

K1

c2 Line 3

Figure 7: Process of exiting the classroom

After exiting or entering the classroom, the system defines the door is in balance status, the system continues to close two bolts to the initial position, which is equal to the locking of the door fewer than two directions of exiting and entering. To increase the speed of processing and the comparison of fingerprint, the system marks each teacher and student. Teachers and students in the classroom will be marked, when the system defines a new person who is going to enter the room, the system just compares the fingerprint of this person with the fingerprint of teachers and students marked to be out of the room. Similarly, when a person wants to exit the classroom, the system compares the fingerprint of this person with fingerprints of those who are in the classroom. Therefore the process speed increases. III. CONCLUSION A. Scale of application.

Line 2

Line 1

ACTAS can be applied to manage and control some schools’ training programs, a centre or centers that are connected by a common network infrastructure. man Out Room

Figure 6: Process of entering the classroom

The process of exiting the classroom is similar. When receiving the controlling signal, the system controls bolt K2, so that the user can push the door to exit the room. The process of exiting the room is recorded successfully after the system receives the signal identifying the participant has passed the LED line 1. The process of exiting the classroom is shown in figure 4.

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The system is designed to manage students who study full time and it creates premises for the managing of credit education type. The system can be designed, installed in labs or classes of centers. To use the system, each classroom needs the fingerprint capture equipment, a computer connected with a server network, which can connect with the system’s data. Additionally, the system can be used to control the centered exams. Each faculty has its own study plan diagram. The applied program only checks calculation over the number of credits assigned for the subject arranged in study weeks. Besides, when the subject is arranged in exam or off – weeks, the system will not consider these period normal ones so that the number of periods of that subject will not increase if it is scheduled in exam weeks due to the study plan.

B. Achievements The control process of students’ attendance time is completely automatic so that the system not only saves the main power for inspection, but also automatically stores the in – out time of teachers and students to calculate and to treat based on the education laws of the Ministry of Education and Training so that the quality of teaching and studying is raised. The system provides an open solution allowing combining with a lot of students and management systems in case the system needs to be upgraded and opened to become an integrated system serving education and training. The system’s database designed according to the normalization rules. The system shows a measure, which applies the biological identification technology in training management. So it not only has its practical meaning but also opens a measure of application the fingerprint identification management based on available equipments and technologies and made premises to develop similar managing applications serving different professions. The system shows one application of biological identification technology in teaching and learning management system. Based on this system, we can expand to apply for the other systems like personal management system, labs management system... IV. SEMINAR It is easy to recognize the advantage of the system using fingerprint identification technology in managing process. Although fingerprint identification theory is perfect, the application of the theory to create the products remains difficult. So, applying commercial fingerprint products for professional cycles of teaching and learning progress creates

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ACTAS. It will save manpower, save time to develop the system and also allow applying the latest fingerprint identity results. A different noticeable tendency for management systems using fingerprint technology is the online, distant learning system. When a student takes part in this education type, the system will check student’s fingerprint data to confirm the validity of the attendance of the student for each lessons or exam REFERENCES [1] Associate professor, Dr. Nguyen Viet Huong; Lecture of the subject SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN. HN 2004 [2] Hanoi University of Technology – Genetic Singapore; System Analysis and Design. 2002. [3] Aptechworldwide; Implementing RDBMS concepts with SQL server 2000 [4] Ngo Dien Tap; Computer connecting techniques. Science and Technology Publisher 2001 [5] Nguyen Thi Ngoc Mai; MS Visual Basic 6.0 and Database programming. Education Publisher 2000 [6] Tong Van On. Microcontroller 8051; Education Publisher 2000 [7] Kenneth J. Ayala; The 8051 Microcontroller Architecture, Programming and Application. West Publishing Company 1991 [8] Stephen Walther; ASP.NET Unleashed, Second Edition; Sams Publishing 2003 [9] Cameron Wakefield, Henk-Evert Sonder, Wei Meng Lee; VB.NET Developer’s Guide; Syngress Publishing Inc. 2001 [10] Microsoft Corp; Microsoft Press, Hardcover, 2nd Bk&CD edition, Published May 2003 [11] http://www.griaule.com/page/en-us/index [12] http://www.123id.us/ [13] http://www.msdn.microsoft.com [14] http://www.keil.com [15] http://www.ti.com [16] http://www.datasheetcatalog.com [17] fvs open source project, Efinger open source project and presentation http://sourceforge.net.