App to read form document (scantron-ish)

Question

Hi all, I need to create form that will be filled in by hand and read digitally. I plan on using a sort of scantron-esque format with rows and columns that the user can just color in the a circle in the appropriate cell and the computer will know that value based on the xy position in the cell matrix. Like an excel address.

     | Sys | TV | printer
---------------------------
6/12 |     | X  | 
---------------------------
6/13 |  X  |    | 
---------------------------
6/14 |     |    |   X

Based on the example above I would have a tv on 6/12, a Sys on 6/13, etc. So the question is, do any of you know an app that reads stuff like this; which I can automate to read the doc and save the output without user intervention? Thanks

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I played around with a couple OCRs and they try so hard to recognise all the text on the screen that they mess up the layout filling it with their odd interpretations of the 'unreadable' characters. This might be the answer, but the ocr would have to let me limit what it tries to read or format.

Answer 1

You want OCR software. There are a few free libraries out there for personal use (I believe google sponsors one). You may want to play around with the layout to make sure OCR clearly identifies the grid.

As long as you get text that allows you to line up the X to it's corresponding column (e.g., for column TV there would be at least 2 non-numerics in between the X and the date), you should be able to interpret the resulting text output.

Answer 2

You want OMR (Optical Mark Recognition). Not sure what your budget is, but Abbyy is one of the leaders in this space:

If you want to try to roll your own, I wrote this article last month

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/showcase/SimpleOMRDotImage.aspx

It's based on the toolkit for the company I work for, but explains the core concepts so that you can try to implement it with whatever imaging toolkit you have.

Answer 3

You want OMR Software Visit OMR Home at http://www.omrhome.com for more details

Answer 4

The best solution is to check out Scantron software at www.scantron.com - you can go for either bi-tonal read with Cognition, or a grayscale read with ScanTools and DesignExpert. This is the only software that reads in grayscale and allows you to differentiate between poor erasures and clean marks.