A Comprehensive Review of Smart Attendance Systems for Secure and Anti-Proxy Attendance

Six studies review shows different technologies have been used for improving efficiency, automation and security of attendance management systems. QR-code-based methods are simple and fast to implement for recording attendance, but still susceptible to QR-code abuse and proxy attendance. Facial-recognition systems provide biometric verification of identity. But the technology can be thrown off by environmental conditions such as poor lighting, facial pose, and occlusion. BLE-based methods provide proximity-based verification, but require compatible devices, permissions, and platform support. Acoustic signal-based authentication can help reduce fraudulent attendance caused by sharing of authentication information. However, acoustic signal- based authentication cannot independently verify the identity or physical presence of the student, and may be affected by the signal and classroom conditions. Further, the reviewed studies suggest that the integration of multiple technologies might enhance attendance verification. However, the approaches presented in this paper do not provide a complete solution for identity verification, physical presence verification, authentication security and protection against spoofing all together. This demonstrates that attendance verification is a domain where multiple complementary mechanisms can be further investigated.   Hence, future work should focus on multi-layer attendance verification approaches combining multiple authentication and verification mechanisms. Such systems may seek to incorporate biometric identity verification, dynamic authentication, location or proximity verification, and liveness detection to enhance protection against proxy attendance . Additionally, future work is recommended to evaluate these approaches under different environmental conditions and consider device compatibility, privacy, security, usability, scalability and computational requirements.   Finally, the reviewed literature paves the way for designing more holistic anti-proxy attendance systems that can verify not only that an attendance request is sent, but also that the request is associated with the correct student and a true physical presence.

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