Interpreting multiple-choice forms (paper) in C#

Question

I have a one-off project where the company is auditing a small amount of data for a huge amount of people. It is probably easiest to get each of these people to audit themselves, but not all people have computer access, so I will have to use a paper-based approach.

Have you seen those paper-based multiple-choice answer sheets? The ones where you fill in the circles with a dark pen/pencil. For putting in dates of birth, names, etc there is a vertical array of numbers and/or letters. On the top/bottom and left/right edges of the paper there're bars which are for alignment and timing.

I'd like to create my own sheet to hand out, and then parse on the computer. Are there any open source libraries for this? As I'm probably only going to use this once, it's probably not efficient to purchase scanners, etc - however our office multifunction can scan a pile of sheets and email them in PDF format. I could either interpret the PDFs directly or extract the embedded images.

Answer 1

Sounds like you're looking for Optical Mark Recognition.

There's an open source OMR project on source forge, and several others mentioned within the Wikipedia article on OMR.