Paper Title
X-Mark Detection of Multiple Answer Test using Template Matching Technique

Abstract
In this paper a template matching technique to identify the presence of X-Mark on the answer sheet of multiplechoice type for automated scoring purpose is proposed. The proposed method will be able to reduce the cost of widely used solution using an expensive machine called the Optical Mark Reader (OMR). The proposed method also allows students to make corrections to their answers by crossing the X mark with minus or plus sign. There are two main stages in the X-mark detection procedure: (i) input preparation stage and (ii) detection stage. In input preparation stage, three sets of experiment data are used. The first set consists of 1311 images of characters X-mark, the second one has 46 images of the correction Xplus-mark and 167 images of the correction Xmin-mark. Normalization step, as part of input preparation stage, normalizes each image’s size to 11 x 11 pixels, and then applies shifting algorithm to that image. In masking process two types of template with different weight are compared. Three experiments are conducted to measure the success rate of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method gives 94% of accuracy for the X-mark detection and 100% for the corrected Xplus-mark detection. Keywords - X-mark, Optical Mark Reader, Correction, Template Matching.