Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Towards Improved Paper-Based Election Technology, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Daniel Lopresti, George Nagy, Ziyan Wu
Towards Improved Paper-Based Election Technology, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Daniel Lopresti, George Nagy, Ziyan Wu
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Resources are presented for fostering paper-based election technology. They comprise a diverse collection of real and simulated ballot and survey images, and software tools for ballot synthesis, registration, segmentation, and ground-truthing. The grids underlying the designated location of voter marks are extracted from 13,315 degraded ballot images. The actual skew angles of sample ballots, recorded as part of complete ballot descriptions compiled with the interactive ground-truthing tool, are compared with their automatically extracted parameters. The average error is 0.1 degrees. These results provide a baseline for the application of digital image analysis to the scrutiny of electoral ballots.
Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots, George Nagy, Daniel Lopresti, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Ziyan Wu
Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots, George Nagy, Daniel Lopresti, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Ziyan Wu
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Photocopies of the ballots challenged in the 2008 Minnesota elections, which constitute a public record, were scanned on a high-speed scanner and made available on a public radio website. The PDF files were downloaded, converted to TIF images, and posted on the PERFECT website. Based on a review of relevant image-processing aspects of paper-based election machinery and on additional statistics and observations on the posted sample data, robust tools were developed for determining the underlying grid of the targets on these ballots regardless of skew, clipping, and other degradations caused by high-speed copying and digitization. The accuracy and robustness of …