Detection of Malpractice in E-exams by Head Pose and Gaze Estimation

Abstract

Examination malpractice is a deliberate wrong doing contrary to official examina-tion rules designed to place a candidate at unfair advantage or disadvantage. The proposed system depicts a new use of technology to identify malpractice in E-Exams which is essential due to growth of online education. The current solu-tions for such a problem either require complete manual labor or have various vulnerabilities that can be exploited by an examinee. The proposed application en-compasses an end-to-end system that assists an examiner/evaluator in deciding whether a student passes an online exam without any probable attempts of mal-practice or cheating in e-exams with the help of visual aids. The system works by categorizing the student’s VFOA (visual focus of attention) data by capturing the head pose estimates and eye gaze estimates using state-of-the-art machine learn-ing techniques. The system only requires the student (test-taker) to have a func-tioning internet connection along with a webcam to transmit the feed. The exam-iner is alerted when the student wavers in his VFOA, from the screen greater than X, a predefined threshold of times. If this threshold X is crossed, the appli-cation will save the data of the person when his VFOA is off the screen and send it to the examiner to be manually checked and marked whether the action per-formed by the student was an attempt at malpractice or just momentary lapse in concentration. The system use a hybrid classifier approach where two different classifiers are used, one when gaze values are being read successfully (which may fail due to various reasons like transmission quality or glare from his specta-cles), the model falls back to the default classifier which only reads the head pose values to classify the attention metric, which is used to map the student’s VFOA to check the likelihood of malpractice. The model has achieved an accuracy of 96.04 percent in classifying the attention metric.