Edu-Connect: An Integrated Student Management System with Facial Recognition-Based Attendance and Online Fee Management

Abstract

In contemporary educational institutions, operational efficiency relies heavily on core administrative processes such as daily subject attendance tracking, academic gradebook maintenance, fee ledger management, and parent-teacher communication. Traditional manual attendance systems consume significant class time, suffer from proxy attendance, and offer zero real-time visibility to guardians. This paper presents an exhaustive systematic literature survey evaluating state-of-the-art developments across automated attendance monitoring, computer vision biometric verification, edge computing, distributed cloud database architecture, and institutional resource planning (IRP). By evaluating peer-reviewed publications from IEEE, ACM, ScienceDirect, and top-tier international journals, this survey identifies critical research gaps in existing standalone solutions. Furthermore, we synthesize an integrated architectural framework for ‘Edu-Connect’ — a unified, web-based platform leveraging Node.js, Express.js microservices, MongoDB Atlas cloud clusters, Razor-pay API transaction rails, and an OpenCV Local Binary Patterns Histograms (LBPH) facial recognition module. The paper details comprehensive system modelling, hardware and software specifications, UI dashboard metrics, database entity relations, multi-tiered security protocols, threat model mitigations, empirical performance evaluations, and ethical deployment guidelines, establishing a holistic benchmark for smart campus management and regulatory compliance.