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IMAGE-BASED SOLUTIONS
There are several processes that are very similar that extract information from
a scanned sheet image:
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
which interprets printed character text and converts it to Word or Adobe PDF documents
- good for getting documents into a form for editing, searching, or archiving
- OMR (Optical Mark Recognition)
which determines whether bubbles or boxes in the form have been marked (note that
this is distinctly different from true OMR which uses a special type of scanner
that actually does the determination and does not rely on this subsequent processing
of an image) - good for less than a couple hundred surveys, questionnaires, and
other instruments that can use only marks rather than characters
- ICR (Intelligent Character
Recognition) includes the image-based OMR above but in addition interprets handwritten
block characters; interpretation of script writing is still on the cutting edge,
is very expensive, not reliable, not cost-effective - ICR is OK for data entry documents
requiring minimal hand-entered data such as medical questionnaires and registrations
THE STEPS OF THE IMAGE SCANNING AND
DATA EXTRACTION PROCESS
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Design the data collection form and have it printed by a commercial printer of on
your own laser printer, making sure that all forms are identical
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Distribute forms at meetinsg, courses, etc. making sure to provide marking instructions
to people who will mark the forms.
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Collect marked forms, organize if necessary, pack carefully, and send to Infoscan.
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Infoscan will put the forms through its image scanners to produce images of each
side of each sheet.
The appropriate software package will then be used
to analyze the images and extract the desired information, as shown in the following:
- The Manual
Correction step is a requirement for this method because data extraction/conversion
efficiency is only in the 90% range and there will be a significant number of "errors"
that need to be corrected by comparing the original marked form with the resulting
data.
- Infoscan can produce statistical reports
and charts from the results.
- Forms,
data files, and reports will be returned to you.
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