What is Optical Mark Recognition (OMR)?

So as part of the alphabet soup of acronyms within the scanning, capture and document management industries, we have three simililar technologies:  OCR, OMR and ICR.  All provide recognition capabilities:

OCR Software - Provides the ability to take an image and recognize text.

OMR Software - Provides the ability to read marks, or check boxes from a scanned image.

ICR Software - provides the ability to read handwriting or handprinted text.

We are all familiar with the scantron form we all utilized in school to fill out our test answers, and scantron was the early provider of mark-sense, or OMR.  Today, OMR technology has gone way beyond the standard form, and can be utilized to read surveys, routing sheets, and colored in shapes on just about any type of form.  Below are links to some key OMR terms on wikipedia:

OMR Definition

Scantron and OMR