Building a simple attendance system with face recognition: a project walkthrough

Taking questions during a session
Taking questions during a session

Originally published at https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/blog/building-a-simple-attendance-system-with-face-recognition. That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first.

An attendance system built on face recognition is a genuinely useful, well-scoped student project — visual, has real users, and forces engaging with matching thresholds and liveness, not just a demo API call.

The pipeline

  1. Enrolment: capture several photos per person under varied lighting, not just one ideal shot.
  2. Matching: embed a live capture and compare against enrolled embeddings with a tuned threshold.
  3. Liveness: a basic check (blink detection, a prompted head turn) so a printed photo can't fool the system.
  4. Logging: record the match confidence alongside the attendance entry, so low-confidence matches can be reviewed.

Where student attempts usually cut corners

Skipping liveness detection entirely, and enrolling with a single photo per person rather than several under different conditions — both make the system look fine in a demo and fail in real daily use.

See face-matching thresholds and liveness detection and anti-spoofing basics.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting KrishGyan — farming advice in your voice and language — in front of a projector screen Presenting KrishGyan

Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer from Kanpur, in a white turtleneck and black jacket, looking to the side Pranjul Rathour — GenAI engineer, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour speaking into a microphone on stage at a MeetKats event Speaking at a MeetKats event

Pranjul Rathour holding a microphone while answering a question during a session Taking questions during a session

Pranjul Rathour in a grey suit at Dr. Virendra Swarup Institute of Computer Studies (VSICS), Kanpur At VSICS, Kanpur

Presenting Annapurna on stage
Presenting Annapurna on stage

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG, fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge: - Email: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com - Invite / talk menu: https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/invite - Portfolio & blog: https://pranjulrathour.scult.in - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranjul-rathour/ - X: https://x.com/PranjulRathourx - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pranjulrathour.in/ - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pranjulrathour.bsky.social - GitHub: https://github.com/Pranjulrathour

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

From my carousels
5 Production AI Apps, All Open Source
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Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour
GenAI engineer, Kanpur · 3x first-prize hackathon winner · campus mentor
I ship production RAG pipelines, fine-tune LLMs and build agentic AI products end to end. I lead engineering at SCULT INDIA for a 14-member team and have mentored 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave.
Open to: GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges.
On stage, at hackathons and on campus
Presenting to a room
Presenting to a room
Requirements gathering and user flows, on stage
Requirements gathering and user flows, on stage
Presenting KrishGyan, farming advice in your voice and language
Presenting KrishGyan, farming advice in your voice and language

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