The National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency created by Congress, has awarded a grant to a Missouri university to develop a smartphone app that would instantly record college students' classroom attendance.The US$50,000 given to Missouri University of Science and Technology by the NSF on 2 January will be used for a project that will record videos to create “face tracklets” of students, according to the grant documents.The foundation argues that checking attendance in traditional ways is too time consuming and inaccurate.”Checking attendance in scenarios such as classrooms commonly needs an instructor to recognize each student one by one by reading the names on a roster or ask students to sign up the attendance sheet,” the grant explains.”This traditional method faces two problems: reading students' names may occupy minutes of lecture time when the number of students is large and letting students to sign up an attendance sheet is prone to be cheated since they can sign their own names and their classmates' names who are absent in the class.”Professors will be trained to use a mobile app that will sweep across the room, keeping track of attendance by storing photos of all of their students, according to the NSF grant.”It is not a desirable task for instructors to calculate the total attendance of every student in a semester by going through every attendance sheet manually,” the grant adds. “By taking videos of student faces in classrooms using Smartphone cameras, the team proposes a unified framework of visual face detection, tracking and recognition algorithms to recognize multi-faces in the video simultaneously,” the grant said.The study will be led by Zhaozheng Yin, an assistant professor in Missouri University's computer sciences department.Professors will take a video of each student's face during the first lecture.”The application will automatically build a face dataset for the course and the instructor only needs to identify them for the first class; in the remaining classes, instructors take videos of each class and the application will do automated attendance check,” the grant said.The app will store “face tracklets,” or multiple photos of a student in different poses.

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