Submission of Student Photographs
The Academic Office page about University Cards, enabling students to upload their photograph, is here .
This web service to enable students to upload their ID photos before coming to Warwick is currently being piloted. The system has been developed by the Corporate Information Systems Group and uses face recognition software to automatically check the suitability of images and crop them for use on University cards.
In the past photographs were sent by post or taken during enrolment, which resulted in lengthy queues, until some years ago a web application was introduced to allow students to upload them before arrival. However, the process of vetting and processing the images before loading them into the membership database was time consuming. Submissions included photos of passports, group shots and other inappropriate images as well as pictures taken badly or of poor quality. Temporary staff were employed to carry out the tedious task of vetting and editing the submissions. Around 75% needed to be loaded into Photo Editor to be cropped and rescaled. At around three minutes per student, this took around two person months during the busy enrolment period each year.
In addition to the requirement to address these problems, staff in the Academic Office required an automatic procedure to upload the photos into the membership system which was within their control.
Paul Chimicz began to investigate ways to improve the process and came up with a prototype application which would not only load photographs but also detect and crop faces. The advantages of this were immediately obvious - we could now detect whether an image contained a face automatically, scale and crop it and check that the resulting image was of suitable quality. The lengthy manual processing could potentially be eliminated.
Having proved the concept, it only remained to make this functionality available to students themselves via the web and add some administrative tools for Academic Office staff. However, the face recognition software could only be run on a Windows machine, and complying with our standard web architecture meant serving the application from a Unix box. Paul's prototype was also written in .NET, and we needed to rewrite it in Java.
A production version using the Spring framework, Hibernate database persistence and RMI (remote method invocation) was architected by Paul Strapps, who also provided in-house training in these technologies. RMI was used to solve the problem of interfacing the face recognition software running under Windows and the UNIX-served java application. The Spring framework made the RMI connection configuration trivial.
As users submitting photographs are not yet enrolled as students, Single Sign-on cannot be used for authentication. Instead a University number and date of birth are entered and authenticated against the Student Records database. The cropped photograph and associated data are stored in a dedicated database.
A process is provided to upload photographs to the membership system using a SOAP interface provided by Bell, the vendors of the membership system. It is possible for a photograph to be uploaded before the subject's card exists on the membership database - in that case, the system will continue to attempt to upload that photograph each time the upload process runs. For that reason theprocess is configured as a scheduled task. The Spring framework made it easy to do this as part of the application, rather than creating a separate cron job.
Administration screens for authorised staff allow them to open and close the subject screens, report on data from the dedicated database, report on data from the membership system, switch the nightly upload on or off or run the upload straight away. These pages are accessible to anyone in a Web Group created for the purpose which is owned by the Academic Office.
It is planned that the system will be in use by all enrolling students in September. In the future it could potentially also be used by staff.
The Academic Office page about University Cards, enabling students to upload their photograph, is here .
Zoe James, 17 July 2007