The “Scoring Exams Optical Mark Recognition” project

Introduction

As the growth of demands for the services of the Aspose Paid Consulting team is increasing, we would like to present a successful story with one of the latest consulting projects “Scoring Exams Optical Mark Recognition”.

The background

The customer was interested in our Aspose.OMR API, which is a simple and practical Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) software for creating and recognizing answer sheets, and he wanted us to develop a project that will use this API.

Demands

He provided seventeen templates and wanted our API to read from Answer Sheets that are template-like and store the results in a CSV file in the exact format that he provided. Every Answer Sheet should also have some data stored in a form of a QR code which we should also recognize and store in a CSV file. The resulting project should be a DLL file that should be runnable from MS Access VBA. Also, he demanded that the project should be developed by Visual Basic programming language.

Main challenges

The main challenges were making RTL support since a lot of templates were Arabic, and it was the job of our Aspose.OMR team to provide such functionality together with some other features that were missing in our API, but were essential for this project.

The project

Aspose Paid Consulting team was obliged to develop a project using Aspose.OMR API, and to communicate with the customer and Aspose.OMR team. The project was developed with .NET Framework using Visual Basic programming language. The Aspose.OMR API was used in the project first to define templates using markup files. After the templates were defined the API could easily recognize the results from the template-like answer sheets. The duration of the project was estimated to be 2-3 months, and it mainly depended on the new RTL feature that needed to be developed.

As the project was going the customer was very satisfied with the communication and results of the project. He was updated about progress on a regular basis, and we agreed that he will be provided with the first sample API by the end of the month.

Sample API

Sample API was able to recognize results from all English templates and store them in the exact format that the customer provided.

After the customer tested the sample API he was very satisfied with the results and pointed out that we were very productive and cooperative. He stated that 90% of the project was already finished and he was able to already use it with some limitations. He announced that he will purchase another month of consulting for finishing the project.

Even though the project wasn’t a big one, we see it as a new lesson learned and we are proud that we did everything to make the customer happy.