What Is OMR?

Date First Published: 15th August 2023

Topic: Computer Systems

Computer Software

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

How Does OMR Work?
Advantages and Disadvantages Of OMR
History

Learn about what OMR is in this article.

Stands for Optical Mark Reading or Optical Mark Recognition. OMR is a way of entering in data by recognising pencil or pen marks on pre-printed forms. It is commonly used for lottery tickets, tests, quizzes, exams, medical forms, and surveys. The hardware scanner detects the marks on the document and converts its physical source into digital data stored on the computer.

How Does OMR Work?

OMR works with a scanner that shines light onto a form. Then, the scanner looks at the different levels of reflectivity of the light at certain positions on the form. It will recognise the black marks because they reflect less light than the blank areas on the form. This is a way of extracting useful data from fill-in fields and checkboxes very quickly and accurately. Its accuracy is up to 99%. Once analysed, the data can be sent to a computer system for processing.

OMR works in a different way than Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as a complex pattern recognition engine is not required. Instead of identifying marks on paper, OCR extracts letters and words from a pre-printed form and is often used to convert hard-copy documents into digital copies.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of OMR

The advantages of OMR are:

It is simple to set up and use. Other than a scanner, a computer, and a pencil or pen to mark a form, no other special equipment is required. Compared to manual data entry, it is much quicker. Depending on the capabilities of the scanner, OMR can allow up to hundreds of thousands of documents to be processed per hour. This makes it more practical for large data collection projects.
It reduces the chances of human errors, like typos in data entries and ensures that data is collected consistently.
It is versatile. OMR can be used for a wide range of things, including lottery tickets, tests, quizzes, exams, medical forms, and surveys.

The disadvantages of OMR are:

Data types are limited. OMR can only identify marks on a pre-printed form and cannot identify other data types, like handwritten text.
There is a possibility of missing data in the scanning process. If the marks don't completely fill the space or are not dark enough on the OMR sheet, data can be missing and not sent to a computer system for processing.
Incorrectly numbered or unnumbered pages can lead to pages being scanned in the wrong order.

History

OMR has evolved from several other technologies. Paper tape and punch cards were two early types of OMR. They used actual holes punched into the form instead of circles filled with pencil marks. Using paper tape as a telegraph input device dates back to 1857. Punch cards were developed in 1890 and used as computer input devices. With the introduction of personal computers in the early 1970s, the use of punch cards has greatly declined.

The IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine, which read marks by detecting the electrical conductivity of graphite pencil lead using pairs of wire brushes that scanned the paper, was the first known mark sense scanner. According to US Patents 2,150,256 (filed in 1932, granted in 1939) and 2,010,653 (filed in 1933, granted in 1935), Richard Warren at IBM conducted experiments with optical mark sense systems for test scoring in the 1930s. According to US Patent 3,050,248 (filed in 1955, awarded in 1962), Everett Franklin Lindquist developed the first successful optical mark-sense scanner.