Face Register

We are looking at the possibility of using Auroras Face Register system attached to SIMs.

If anyone out there has any experience of this system I'd be grateful if you could post comments good or bad here, or pm me if you prefer.

Main points I'm looking for initially are;

Is it worth the expenditure?
Has there been a significant reduction to the staff work load?
How reliable has it been in updating the MIS?
How reliable has the hardware been?
Do students like using it?

There are probably other questions but that will do for now :)

Any input welcome.

If I was a student, from what I saw on their website I would be against it, the same way I'm against fingerprints.

I could easy see these causing issues comparing photos based on the lighting present when a student goes to use one.

Student photos are held on SIMs anyway and the lighting issue is one reason I'm asking the questions :)

As for the finger printing, the actual finger print is never held on any systems, it works by matching a number of points. (Exactly how, I'm not sure).

The fingerprint is never held in the system but I suppose you could take the fingerprint that's been lifted from a crime scene convert it into it's long number as per say the library system and then search the database for any matches thus you don't need to match on the fingerprint itself.

Ben

I looked at this at BETT as was asked by SMT to consider it

The company said it was aimed at 6th form or smaller schools as the time taken to register would mean a bank of these installed

The person is bathed in infra-red light so the image is consistent

Seen it working at BETTS and was not that impressed with either the unit or the time taken to register

We had this on trial but found it to be not worth the cost for such a secure means of authenticating students. Card (mifare or swipe) or fingerprint would be a better value I think.

could you not just print off a photo and hold it infront of the face scanner to trick the machine?:troll:

Thankfully not. It was tried believe me!
It was a really sophisticated system and I can see many benefits especially in situations where you are likely to have a large number of multilingual people needing to clock-in/out as it would recognise the face and could display the current news/message for the day in the language required.
Just not that applicable in a school environment really, for us at least.

SMT decided not to go for it in the end, cost was one reason and the other was that it would not be suitable at the moment.

I did get a call telling me the units are getting smaller and I suppose the more they sell will help the price come down a little but at this time it's not for us.