Me and my team have been looking into staying with using pen-and-paper scouting, but updating how the data is entered. We want to scan sheets and have entries in an Access database automatically fill out based on whats written on the sheet. I know this isn’t entirely unheard of, but I’ve had very little luck looking for something that allows us to do that, and I decided to come here to try and ask for help.
As a member of team 423, I was working on a scantron-based scouting system in the 2015 off-season, but it wasn’t ready for competition use. I believe the idea got scrapped after I graduated. Every few months I run out of new projects so I work a little more on it. The software is basically done; it just needs tuning and a sturdier camera setup.
The idea is simple. Using a scantron-like sheet, you bubble in the answers to your scouting questions. The sheets could either be specifically printed based on teams’ match schedules, or you can bubble that in by hand. The sheets then get handed to the head scouter, who uses a laptop and webcam setup to scan them into the computer, which interprets them and tabulates the data.
The code wasn’t that hard to write. I did it once in LabVIEW using NIvision then again in Java with OpenCV. It can’t read in custom text like an OCR, but it’s a lot easier to code and implement, and will likely be less buggy in use. If you’re interested, I can PM you my code.
As far as an OCR API, Tesseract-OCR is fantastic. However, I don’t think it would work out too well. In my experience with scouting, there’s a lot of people with bad handwriting and scribbling in margins, which even advanced ocr libraries have a bit of trouble with. Scantron based stuff seems much easier to implement.
That said, my team has abandoned pen and paper for Google Forms. Exports everything to a spreadsheet on the cloud for you, and easy to share. I’ve developed apps for us to use before, but forms you don’t have to worry about any server hosting or deprecated apis or changing questions, etc.