CGK RecoStar OCR Software to be Used in Australian Census.

Business Editors

RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 17, 2000

CGK announced today that it was awarded a contract for CGK RecoStar OCR software integrated with IBM's Intelligent Forms Processing (IFP) software to be used as a part of the Australian Census system.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is the agency responsible for the Census, which will be conducted on August 7, 2001. There are approximately 19 million people in Australia and some 30,000 collectors will be recruited and trained to deliver and collect census forms. A centralised processing centre will be set up and staffed by about 1,000 ABS officers to capture, code and validate over seven hundred million responses. It is expected that these processes will begin in late August 2001 with the total processing phase lasting approximately 12 months.

The Census of Population and Housing is the largest statistical operation undertaken by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The objective of the Census is to accurately measure the number of people and dwellings in Australia on census night, and a range of their key characteristics. The Census provides the basis for periodic estimates of the population of each of Australia's States, Territories and Local Government Areas, primarily for electoral purposes and the distribution of government funds. The Census also provides information about the population's characteristics and its housing within small geographic areas to support planning, administration, policy development and evaluation activities in the public and private sectors. At the urging of the United Nations World Population and Housing Census Programme, most countries will carry out population and housing censuses during the period 1995-2004. This is the eighth national population census that CGK recognition software has been recently selected for, joining Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the US censuses.

According to the UN, the census is "one of the primary sources of data needed for effective development planning and the monitoring of population issues and socio-economic and environmental trends, policies and programmes aimed at the improvement of living standards," and "population and housing censuses provide valuable statistics and indicators for assessing the situation of various special population groups, such as those affected by gender issues, children, youth, the elderly, persons with an impairment/disability/handicap and the homeless and migrant population."

According to Michael Breithaupt, CGK's Technical Director "we are especially pleased to be selected by IBM, who have a professional OCR evaluation staff, for the Australian Census." Stephen Hanks, IBM IFP Solution Manager added, "The CGK OCR engine improved the character recognition accuracy during tests compared to other engines and allowed a cost effective reduction in the manual data repair coding effort."

The base of the system used by the ABS agency is IBM Global Services' IFP software. The IFP system provides ABS the ability to scan and capture census data automatically from images of the census forms. IFP then validates the data using both automated and manual verification techniques and exports the data to the ABS legacy system for processing and generation of reports. This process significantly improves the speed and accuracy of the data that is captured from the forms compared to the labor-intensive key-entry process used before. The flexibility of the IFP system also allows it to be used to capture data from a variety of different kinds of forms. IBM's Global Services -- Government organization can implement the IFP system worldwide. More information on IFP can be found at http://www.clearlake.ibm.com/gov/ifp/

CGK, recently acquired by Oce, is the recognized leader in providing fast and reliable machine print and handprint (OCR and ICR) recognition software components for mission critical forms processing applications. In the US, CGK's RecoStar and AEG recognition software products command an impressive 60% market share. CGK also manufactures leading edge image capture products including the industry's first high performance production color page scanner.