Dear Gustavo You were so kind to share your insights with me that I thought you may be interested in a slightly different but usable approach to the problem you addressed in recognizing the table on the ballot, and then putting the cells of the table into a matrix that can be analyzed to determine its contents.

This article is from a computer science group in Brasil. They approached the problem by identifying that a table has 9 "structured elements". These elements correspond to the four corners of the table, the four sides of the table and the intersection of the lines of the cells that do not lie along the borders of the table. By recognizing these structured elements, one can identify and segment the cells of a table, then read the cells' contents.

I have still not been able to get your solution to work, but it has been helpful. I am still trying to understand what your code does in some points. Thanks again. Sincerely William

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Dear Gustavo Your program is pretty amazing. It ran all the way down to the last line but is giving an error that I cannot understand. It indicates that "Part::partw: Part 1 of {} does not exist. >>" My interpretation is that it does not seem to recognize {h, horizontalGridLineMasks} I have attached the notebook with the image I am trying to work on. If you have any advice as to how fix this, I would greatly appreciate it. The data are the largest database in the world on memory loss in Alzheimer's Disease and normal aging, and will result in some real important breakthroughs for the field. Sincerely Rod Shankle

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dear Marco Thank you very much. I will try this out and let you know how it works. Sinbcdrely Rod