Question : Problem: OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) Scanners

hi

I am looking for an OMR scanner that I can easily use to scan exams which are filled in circles with lead pencils. I already have Remark Office OMR software which detects the marks and interprets
the results. I need help with name/company/brand of scanner which are highly accurate with this
application and have a good scan speed also!


thanks

Answer : Problem: OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) Scanners

Hi Hasan,

Accurate OMR can be obtained from 200dpi black & white (mono/ 1-bit - NOT GREY SCALE) scans - I would say every scanner on the market can achieve this resolution quite happily.  The scanners responsibility is scanning efficiently (features like deskew help with OMR - thats DESKEW in the printer, and not after it has left the printer).  It is your softwares responsibility to handle the OMR - so perhaps this is where you need to invest a little more money if the accuracy you have at the moment is poor.  If you want an idea of what up to date software can do for you automically, see here --> http://www.verity.com/products/teleform/index.html (formerly Cardiff Teleform) - entry level system is a couple of thousand (£).

If you want advice on a scanner make/model, you need to ask yourself:

What is your budget for a scanner?
How many forms do you ideally wish to scan at a time? - Is it important to have a large capacity automatic document feeder so you can stack up 100's at once or is it more important to scan 50 forms per minute?
How fast is fast to you? - 1-5? 6-25? 26-50?  Is this per form (single (simplex) or double sided (duplex) ?), per side of form?

Personal Flatbed Scanners range from £25 - £250 and allow you to scan single pages simplex (single side at a time) - Flatbed scanners have a very poor throughput due to the manual requirement of humans having to lift the lid, remove the page, place a new page on the glass, close the lid etc.  I cannot advise on a decent home scanner as I only work with business grade scanners.

Small to medium business scanners start around £700 (scanner only - not multifunction device..)
Take the Fujitsu 4120, I sell them for around £800, its a very competent A4 low volume scanner (to maintain the warranty on the scanner, you mustn't need to scan more than 500 impressions per day (an impression is 1 side of a page..)) - it comes with an automatic document feeder (capacity ~ 50 pages), it has an optical resolution of 600dpi and it can scan BOTH SIDES OF THE PAGE at the same time (SINGLE PASS DUPLEX SCANNING), it can scan 25 ipm (impressions per minute) it also comes with a useful set of applications. http://www.fcpa.com/products/scanners/fi-4120c/

It has a bigger brother, the Fujitsu 4340 (~£3,700), 80ipm, auto drop-out colours (without needing to put coloured lamps in it.), 100 sheet ADF, 800dpi (mono, 600dpi colour), 3000 pages per day duty cycle, double feed detector, page size detector.  Hardware JPEG compression (the scanner performs the complex operation of compressing the scanned image BEFORE it passes it to your computer.. very nice indeed if you do a lot of full colour scans.  http://www.fcpa.com/products/scanners/fi-4340c/

If £700 isn't within your budget for a more efficient scanner, I would say hold onto your money and keep doing it the way you are - because spending less than this isn't going to help you.

Another option for you may be a technology called Virtual Re-Scan from Kofax, it is a driver which sits between your scanner and OCR/OMR product, and intelligently modifies the image to make recognition rates a lot higher - http://www.kofax.com/products/virtualrescan/index.asp - you have to remember this is still an emerging market, most of the equipment/software that would benefit you in your situation is very expensive because the people working in this field like to keep it in the 'black art' category!

Hope this helps a bit!

Best Regards

Nick Askew
(from Reef Document Solutions)