The Problem
Badge swiping was slow, fraud-prone, and hated by everyone.
The facility had 500+ workers across multiple shifts. Every morning, a 20-minute queue formed at the badge readers. Buddy punching was rampant — workers swiped for absent colleagues, costing the company thousands in ghost payroll.
They tried fingerprint scanners. Workers with calloused hands from the factory floor had a 30% failure rate. The system was abandoned within weeks.
They needed something that was fast, fraud-proof, and worked for every hand — literally.
Our Approach
Face-first. Cloud-free. Sub-second.
On-device face detection
Android tablets at each entry point run ML Kit for real-time face detection. The face is captured and sent to the server — no cloud round-trips, no internet dependency. Works even during network outages with a local queue.
FaceNet embeddings + pgvector similarity search
Each face is converted to a 512-dimensional embedding using FaceNet/ArcFace. These embeddings are stored in PostgreSQL with pgvector, enabling cosine similarity search across all 500+ employees in under 50ms.
Production-hardened from day one
Dockerized deployment, health checks, automated backups, and a real-time dashboard showing live attendance, late arrivals, and shift analytics. The operations team sees everything — no more manual reconciliation.
Timeline
From kickoff to production in 10 weeks.
Discovery & Architecture
Stakeholder interviews, system design, face-encoding pipeline design
Core Engine
FaceNet/ArcFace integration, pgvector similarity search, Spring Boot APIs
Android App
On-device ML Kit face detection, offline queue, camera optimization
Dashboard & Reports
Real-time attendance dashboard, Excel exports, admin controls
Deployment & Hardening
Docker deployment, load testing, monitoring, security audit
The Results
Numbers that speak for themselves.
developersEra didn't just build our attendance system — they engineered something that handles 500+ employees daily without a single hiccup. The face recognition is faster than badge swiping. We haven't had a single buddy-punching incident since.
Rajesh M.
Operations Director, Manufacturing Facility, Chhattisgarh