<![CDATA[The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision has revolutionized conventional attendance systems by introducing automated and intelligent alternatives. Traditional approaches such as manual entry and fingerprint-based systems are often inefficient, error-prone, and unsuitable for large-scale student management. This study evaluates a hybrid face recognition framework that combines You Only Look Once version 5 su, Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to automate student attendance. The YOLOv5su algorithm performs fast and lightweight face detection, while HOG extracts gradient-based facial descriptors classified by SVM. Experiments were conducted using a facial image dataset consisting of 500 original images from 10 classes (50 images per class), which were augmented to 3,500 images with variations in pose, expression, and illumination. The proposed YOLOv5sU–HOG–SVM model achieved 97.1% detection accuracy and 97% recognition accuracy, with mean precision, recall, and F1-score values of 0.98, outperforming conventional CNN-based hybrid models in both accuracy and computational efficiency. These results demonstrate that the combination of YOLOv5su, HOG, and SVM provides a novel balance between detection speed and recognition robustness, making it suitable for real-time academic attendance management. Future work should integrate transformer-based facial feature extraction to further enhance robustness under extreme conditions and larger-scale datasets.]]>
