The ICT4Girls 3-day Virtual Hackathon 2020 gathered women from institutions across Nigeria from 1st – 3rd December 2021 to build an AI-based face recognition system. Four women from the University of Lagos, University of Ibadan and University of Nigeria, Nsukka lead the hackathon on-site at Eko-Konnect premises while 52 others joined remotely to contribute to the development of the project. Further communication was done via Whatsapp.

The aim of the hackathon was to give participants practical experience following their completion of the ICT4Girls online courses in Physical computing and Robotics & Computer Vision. The AI-based face recognition system was built using a Raspberry Pi and  Pi camera for real-time recognition. The system is based on the computer vision principle, a branch of Artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with Python program and openCV for training a dataset of face images.

The case scenario for the system was to use the AI-based Face recognition as an automated class attendance for monitoring students’ attendance whereby a microcomputer will recognise a trained face’s image and then a digital camera will scan the face to register attendance and record the attendee’s name, time of clock in and out of the system and duration of attendance and store the collected data on a cloud web platform or spreadsheet appended to the code.

The hackathon concluded with the lead presenting the project demo by clocking in and out a dummy class attendance with the face recognition system. It was a great learning experience for the participants to hone good research, engineering and coding & machine learning skills.

The full demo is available on our Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/BiK2ZUYFiN4