Biometrics for Attendance Management Part 1
Problems in Attendance Management
The most frequent inquiries we mofiria recently receive may be about attendance management. They are hoping to implement some kind of biometrics into their own existing solution or a customized development for a specific company or organization.
So many companies and organizations are still using IC cards, timecards or even hand-writing manually for recording attendance data.
These operation methods have some problems about incorrect attendance data by proxy time recording of IC card or timecard, or by tampering the data.
Especially, it can be a serious problem for corporations and organizations that employ many part-time workers for hourly wage.
Also, it is not efficient to issue an IC card every time a worker on fixed-term contract or a part-timer is replaced.
The loss of cards by workers is also a big problem. For example, a company that has around 10,000 workers has to reissue the cards several times every month by this kind of loss. Every time this incident happens, the administrator has to take their time to disable the lost card as well as reissue a card.
In order to avoid these kinds of problems, introducing biometrics into attendance management is one of the most effective means.
As one person’s biometric information can’t be applied to others, a worker can use only their own information. This can clear any problems about proxy time recording, loss of card and involved security problems.
Suitable Biometric Modality for Attendance Management
When you introduce a biometric modality into attendance management, the candidate would be the following four methods; fingerprint, vein, face or iris.
If you examine these methods by comparing various factors such as supported platform, required authentication device, accuracy, processing speed and so on, fingerprint or vein would be the probable candidate.
However, when you use fingerprint authentication into attendance management, the authentication process often fails if the user’s finger is wet.
Though mofiria also basically recommend using the authentication device after wiping off moisture on the user’s hand and fingers since the standard devices aren’t water-proof and it’s optional, it has no problem in terms of authentication process even if a finger is wet a little.
Another problem in fingerprint authentication is that fingerprint is not so resistant to forge fingerprint data. Some fingerprint authentication technologies are still innovating and some advanced technologies have introduced a mechanism to prevent the forgery.
However, in some countries, it seems there are some traders or kits that create a forged fingerprint cheaply for conventional fingerprint authentication technologies. You sometimes can see the news about illegal use of forged fingerprints including some public service workers in one country received false overtime payment illegally using forged fingerprints.
In such cases, the main purpose of introducing biometrics would be in vein.
Vein authentication has a disadvantage of expensive authentication device compared to fingerprint authentication. However, for the use of the device for attendance management, the price of the device would not be a problem since they would use one device with several to large number of people unlike logging-on to computer or single sign-on.
However, the decision which biometric modality is chosen would be made by the end-user. We can’t declare the most suitable modality in general in terms of required security level and introduction cost, in addition to advantages and disadvantages of each one.
Face recognition is in fashion now but unavailable in some countries
How To Implement Biometrics
When you develop or implement biometrics driven attendance management system, you have to decide several elements as follows:
・Storage location of biometric information data
・Authentication accuracy
・Authentication method
・Location of matching process
・Local computer for connecting authentication device to
・Connection interface of authentication device
The next article introduces the details about Each elements above.
Author of this article
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Tomohiro Yamada mofiria Corporation Senior Sales Manager General Manager in Marketing |
