Document analysis issues in reading optical scan ballots

Optical scan voting is considered by many to be the most trustworthy option for conducting elections because it provides an independently verifiable record of each voter’s intent. While op-scan technology has been in use for decades, attempts to improve the machine reading of ballots raises a range of interesting issues in document image analysis. Work thus far has been hindered by a lack of real-world data, since ballots associated with actual elections are kept secure from the public and normally destroyed after a period time. Fortunately, as a result of a recent challenged election in the State of Minnesota, a large collection of op-scan ballot images was made available for public inspection on the World Wide Web. In this paper, we present this unique resource to the document analysis community. We also describe our efforts to annotate the collection, including the latest version of a graphical tool we have developed for collecting ground-truth interpretations, along with the p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DAS
• Authors: Daniel P. Lopresti, George Nagy, Elisa H. Barney Smith
• Keywords: Ballot Images, DAS 2010, Document Analysis, Document Image Analysis, Optical Scan Voting