IBM OMR Card

Optical Mark Recognition (also called Optical Mark Reading and OMR) is the process of capturing human-marked data from document forms such as surveys and tests and multiple choice question examinations. Optical mark recognition is used to detect answer

Many traditional OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) devices work with a dedicated scanner device that shines a beam of light onto the form paper. The contrasting reflectivity at predetermined positions on a page is then utilized to detect the marked areas because they reflect less light than the blank areas of the paper.

OMR is generally distinguished from optical character recognition (OCR) by the fact that a complicated pattern recognition engine is not required. That is, the marks are constructed in such a way that there is little chance of not reading the marks correctly. This does require the image to have high contrast and an easily-recognizable or irrelevant shape. A related field to OMR and OCR is the recognition of barcodes such as the UPC bar code found on product packaging.

This card produced by IBM will be scanned by a punch card size scanner which can be continuously fed. It is marked as an Exam Card Answer To Questions and has the reference Sheffield Polytechnic

This card was kindly donated by Nigella Ballard