GAITHERSBURG, MD, 05/24/2000 -- The Lockheed Martin-designed system that is being used to help tally the U.S. Census has successfully processed over a billion census pages, recognizing the characters written and boxes marked on them with an accuracy rate of better than 99 percent.

It's been termed the largest, most complex data capture project in history and the Data Capture System 2000 being used to help tally the U.S. Census is performing with record-setting speed and accuracy as it reads the hand printing on millions of census paper forms.

In the three-week period following mailing of the forms, the Data Capture System 2000 processed 80 million envelopes containing census forms, capturing geographic information included in their barcodes. The Census Bureau is using the barcode information for its non-response follow-up operation.
System processing was three days ahead of schedule in completing the check-in of returned forms and processing of surnames by mid-April, allowing follow-up lists for enumerators to be developed sooner than planned.

System processing was two weeks ahead of schedule in completing the processing of all mailout/mailback forms by end of May allowing the early start of enumerator form processing.

An accuracy rate of better than 99 percent has been maintained for the critical optical character recognition process, well above the 98 standard established by the Census Bureau.

The system will convert information printed by hand and check marks into digital format from 132 million census forms, consisting of more than 1.5 billion pages.
Never before has the Census Bureau converted this much data in this short a time, said Clyde Relick, program manager for Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, who noted that on the first peak days of processing more than 6 million forms arrived at the Census Bureau's four national processing centers.

The Data Capture System 2000 supports the entire census questionnaire processing from check-in of arriving forms to the point where the final captured data is forwarded to Census Bureau computers, ready for analysis by Census Bureau demographers. When the Census processing is completed, the system is expected to have processed well over 1.5 billion census form pages.

The DCS 2000 system is in operation at census processing centers in Baltimore, Md; Jeffersonville, Ind; Phoenix, Ariz; and Pomona, Calif.

A leader in mission critical systems integration and information operations, Lockheed Martin Mission Systems serves U.S. and international defense and civil government agencies. Mission Systems employs about 2,700 at major facilities in Gaithersburg, Md., Colorado Springs, Colo., Manassas, Va., and Santa Maria, Calif., and is a business unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation.