A Method for Measuring Working Hours of Telework Including a Few Staffs on a Monitor

Abstract

This paper presents a method for measuring the working time of employees who work on a PC using a webcam. In the situation of an online meeting where multiple people join in a camera frame, it is difficult to monitor the employees applying conventional face recognition techniques because the target faces are too small in the frame and they freely change the face direction. The proposal captures a frame per min. to the PC user and transforms it into a black-and-white image recognizing the skin color. Then, the image is discriminated into either of working or not by utilizing run-lengths of every scanning line in the image. The working time is measured by counting continuous frames discriminated as working. In the experiments, the performance of the discrimination was examined with a movie where four people join in the camera frame of a single webcam, and it was confirmed that the proposal could perfectly discriminate all the frames.