IRIS helps implement scanning stations for South-African general election

Quite an interesting press release from one of clients using their OCR technology in the South African Elections:

Louvain-la-Neuve, May 18, 2009 – I.R.I.S. Group, a publicly traded company (Euronext Brussels: IRI), market leader in Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR), Electronic Document Management (EDM) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) announced today the successful implementation in South-Africa of 400 scanning stations running IRISPowerscan to process the national election results slips.

In order to guarantee the secure procedures for South Africa’s 2009 elections, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) made known that they required a scanning solution to accommodate the backup of result slips in the 2009 election. The tender specified that each of the 297 municipalities would have to be provided with one or more scanners dependant on volumes and a scanning application that would meet specific requirements.

For this election I.R.I.S. started working on the project with FirstCoast Technologies, a local South African company who specializes in Document centric technology, to deliver the complete solution to the IEC: IRISPowerscan™ (I.R.I.S.’ scanning, indexing and OCR platform) combined with high speed document scanners and the automatic data transfer solution developed by First Coast Technologies won the upper hand!

Pierre De Muelenaere, President & CEO of I.R.I.S. Group, comments this success: “IRISPowerscan™’s ease of implementation and flexible indexing (manual and OCR-assisted) as well as its comprehensive abilities in terms of barcode recognition, image hyper-compression and output formats, seemed the perfect solution from the start. From an operator standpoint too, effective quality control as well as document and page manipulation offered all the user-friendliness initially required.”

The Election Process
Votes have been performed in more than 20,000 voting stations across the country. After closing the voting process, boxes full of ballots were sent to 297 municipalities for counting and auditing. These municipalities generated +- 80.000 results slips that have been scanned and processed with IRISPowerscan.

When a box was opened at a counting station, the batch of ballots inside it was allocated a unique batch number for that voting district. IRISPowerscan™’s job was to read the barcode and data from the results slips and to convert it to a small XML file.

Deployed system
The system implemented by FirstCoast Technologies and I.R.I.S. comprised for each scanning station:
- A professional ADF and color scanner offering a 40 ppm scanning speed
- IRISPowerscan, I.R.I.S.’ professional scanning application, for the results slips indexing
- The automatic transfer and encryption of the results slips images and XML files to the IEAC Head office

Verdict
The elections took place on April 22, 2009. At the end of the process approximately 80.000 pages were scanned and transmitted across South Africa to the IEC head office in Pretoria. Forty-eight hours later the last result slip came in and the final results where announced the same morning, one day earlier than initially expected.

The system and its performance were applauded by all parties involved, with statistics speaking for themselves: none of the scanners gave any issue during the event, and not one support call during the election was related to IRISPowerscan™.

Tags: technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.