What if computers invigilate examination?

Have you ever wondered what would it be like if the computers were invigilating the exams? Examination malpractices constantly remained a bother in the educational system. With so much of strictness being introduced inside the examination halls, which includes preventing the examinees to carry their own materials, putting students under active surveillance by multiple invigilators and even fixing CCTV cameras inside the examination halls, we decided to explore what's the next thing we are likely to see in this practice. In this project, we explored a way to create a virtual examination supervision system that can check the examinees throughout the examination. We trained the computers to detect the motion of the candidates which are considered inappropriate during an examination. We used a very popular object detection algorithm introduced by Viola and Jones - ‘Rapid Object Detection using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Feature’, which forms the key component of the setup we have designed. The journey was not simple and we had to pass through several critical challenges towards designing this first step in creating a robust virtual examination surveillance system.

This project was presented in Cypher 2018 organized by Analytics India Magaine by Prof. Gourab Nath and three other students of the batch of January 2018 - Karthik Raman, Akanksha Sahu and Himanshi Tindwani. Click on this link to watch the entire presentation.

Prof. Gourab Nath delivering a tech talk at Cypher 2018