Once again, LEAD Technologies is proud to be a part of the 9th annual National Health IT Week (September 15 – 19, 2014). Last year, over 375 organizations participated and 2014 is projected to have over 400 partners. LEAD Technologies joins with the other hundreds of companies around the country to celebrate progress and add to the conversation of how Health Information Technology is growing and improving people’s health.

At its core, healthcare is performed by the many great doctors, nurses, EMTs, radiologists, and more that are directly serving their patients. However, every great front-line worker has a great supporting cast, within which Health IT gets to play a major role. The successful application of medicine and care is greatly enhanced through Electronic Health Records (EHR), Picture Archival and Communication Systems (PACS), advanced imaging technologies, infrastructure and so on. These important pieces of the overall healthcare system provide improved patient safety, fewer medical errors, earlier detection, and stronger patient/provider relationships.

LEAD Technologies’ Contribution to the Healthcare Industry

LEAD Technologies, Inc. provides a variety of products and services that are advancing Health IT.

LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging SDKs

Our primary product, LEADTOOLS, is a family of imaging toolkits for Medical, Document, Raster and Multimedia imaging. Our Medical Imaging, PACS Imaging, and Medical Imaging Suite developer toolkits are revered as some of the most heavily awarded, programmer-friendly, fully-featured and best-selling toolkits in the world. With comprehensive DICOM and PACS technology along with high-end 2D and 3D viewer controls with support for .NET, CDLL, HTML5 / JavaScript, WinRT, iOS, OS X, Android and more, LEADTOOLS lives up to its reputation as the World Leader in Imaging SDKs.

Beyond our medical product line, the document and multimedia products we provide have their place in Health IT as well. OCR, Forms Recognition, Barcode, PDF, Video Streaming and more are all part of a global healthcare infrastructure that is more organized, digital and connected than ever before.

Medicor Imaging

Medicor Imaging is a division of LEAD Technologies created to provide the medical imaging community with products and professional services that will help facilitate a more rapid transition into the digital era. Powered by LEADTOOLS, Medicor Imaging’s DICOM and PACS solutions (i.e. MiPACS) are used world-wide in Multi-Clinic Dental Organizations, Schools, ENT Practices, Hospitals, Imaging Centers and the US Department of Veteran Affairs.

CodeProject

A new, major version of LEADTOOLS is right around the corner. Version 19 is packed full of incredible Document, Medical and Multimedia Imaging technology with many new features and enhancements across the board. Developers can do more than ever before with LEADTOOLS V19.

Document Imaging

• Document and image viewers for all platforms
  • New SVG engine for smooth scrolling and zooming of documents
  • Search text and use annotations on any format
  • Multi-page lazy loading for large documents
• Convert PDF & Office formats at 100% accuracy without the need for OCR
• Improved OCR accuracy for all languages including East Asian
• New barcode types: Aztec, MaxiCode & Micro QR
• Structured and unstructured forms recognition and processing with OEM-ready forms applications (checks, passports, driver licenses, invoices)
• PDF and Office format viewing, editing and conversion: convert hundreds of different file types to PDF, DOC/DOCX, RTF, HTML, XPS and more
• Powerful PDF SDK is feature packed and includes page manipulation, optimize PDF, bookmarks and metadata; create PDF/A files, PDF annotations, image extraction and more
• Zero-footprint HTML5/JavaScript UI controls & web services
• Image cleanup and pre-processing

Medical Imaging

• Comprehensive DICOM SDK supporting the latest specifications
• PACS client and server components
• Optional third-party cloud storage integration in the DICOM Storage Server
• New HL7 SDK with decoders, listener service and MWL integration
• Redesigned, highly customizable, cloud-enabled HTML5 / JavaScript zero-footprint medical viewer
• Rich Client Medical Web Viewer (IE only)
• Medical image processing
• Medical annotations and collaboration tools
• 3D volume construction and advanced visualization
• Specialized 8-16 bit grayscale image display
• OEM-ready applications with source code

Multimedia

• H.265 with 4K and 8K ultra-high-definition
• Capture, convert, stream and play audio and video
• Hundreds of formats and codecs for DirectShow and Media Foundation
  • MPEG-2 Transport Stream, H.264, MPEG-4 & more
• KLV metadata
• UAV and UAS
• Audio and video processing filters and transforms including overlays and motion detection
• DICOM reading and writing

Imaging

• Hundreds of file and image formats for loading, saving and compression
• Thousands of image processing algorithms
• New Image Viewer control for all platforms
• Scan with TWAIN from the web

More to come in the following weeks! Sign up for our newsletter to get all the latest information regarding LEADTOOLS Version 19 sent directly to your inbox.

CodeProject

LEADTOOLS Version 19 is here! It is one of the most highly-anticipated and feature-packed releases ever. LEAD Technologies is once again raising the bar with unique and innovative imaging technologies, frameworks and solutions, and continues to prove why they are The World Leader in Imaging SDKs.

Since there are so many new features in this new release, we will highlight the new and improved technologies in each engine over the next few days. Today, we will be starting with the Document Imaging SDK Technology in LEADTOOLS, which is headlined by the new Document Viewer and Document Converter frameworks for .NET and HTML5/JavaScript.

New Documents SDK

• All-new framework for creating, reading and writing raster and SVG images, annotations, thumbnails, text data and metadata from supported document types
  • Document Converter – Convert PDF & office formats at 100% accuracy without the need for OCR
  • Document Viewer – View any format with text search, annotations, lazy loading, and SVG rendering
  • Document Writers – Redesigned to use cross-platform SVG rather than Windows-only EMF
• Comprehensive support for today’s most popular document, vector and raster image formats
  • Adobe Acrobat PDF and PDF/A
  • Microsoft Office DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX and PPT/PPTX, PST, EML, MSG and XPS formats
  • CAD formats such as DXF, DWG and DWF
  • TIFF, JPEG, PNG, EXIF, BMP and hundreds more raster image formats
  • Plain Text, RTF, HTML, MOBI, ePub and more
  • IBM AFP, MO:DCA, IOCA and PTOCA

Forms Recognition and Processing

• Added support for unstructured and semi-structured form types
  • Invoice
  • Passport & MRZ
  • Driver’s License & ID
  • Checks & MICR
• Redesigned demos with advanced editors for all form types
• Significant speed improvements
• New drop-out pre-processing algorithm

OCR

• Improved OCR accuracy across all languages including East Asian and Arabic
• Enhanced auto-zone algorithm
• More efficient memory usage
• Improved detection of foreground and background colors for text areas
• New manual and automated perspective deskew algorithm improves the recognition of perspectival skewed images with 3D Deskew filtering

PDF

• Across-the-board speed improvements
• Load text, vector graphics and raster images
• Enhanced rasterization and thumbnail generation
• PDF Optimizer tool for reducing PDF document size
• New WinRT PDF libraries
• Added images extraction and decoding
• Improvements to extraction of resources including fonts, bookmarks, metadata, etc.
• New compression options including JPEG2000
• Added support for extraction of Unicode text
• New options for PDF document Initial View
• Added AutoPrint functionality

Annotations

• Multi-container annotations
• New annotation and markup object types
  • New text-based review annotation types similar to Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word
  • Bates Stamp
  • Filled-in arrowhead
• Auto-resize option for wrapped objects
• Improved options for loading and saving annotations
• Added ability to use Image Viewer Control’s Interactive Modes and Automated Annotations simultaneously

Barcode

• New barcode types (read and write)
  • Micro QR Code
  • Aztec Code
  • MaxiCode
• Added support for reading flipped QR Codes

Additional Document Updates

• New document cleanup image processing functions
• Improved support for Internet Printing Protocol (IPP)

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Engine.

CodeProject

The new Microsoft enterprise tech conference, Microsoft Ignite, is bringing together the best of their past individual events — the Management Summit and Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and TechEd conferences — for a single, tech-fueled conference with better content and connections than ever before. LEAD Technologies is excited to be a part of this brand-new show and will have LEADTOOLS Version 19 on full display. LEAD’s world-class imaging technologies help developers create applications for many of the conference’s themes and talking points including cloud infrastructure, big data, mobility and more.

• HTML5 / JavaScript Viewers
• Web Scanning with TWAIN
• Web Services
• Distributed Processing
• Document Converter
• Document Viewer
• OCR
• Barcode
• Forms Recognition and Processing
• DICOM
• PACS
• HL7
• Multimedia

Visit LEAD Technologies at Microsoft Ignite

In addition to these features, LEADTOOLS will have much more on display at Ignite. While you are in Chicago, we hope you take the time to visit our booth and check out the latest document, medical and multimedia imaging technology LEADTOOLS has to offer.

Microsoft Ignite Details

May 4 – 8, 2015
Chicago, IL
Booth # TBA

Contact us (Ignite-2015@leadtools.com) to set up an appointment to meet with our representatives at the show.

CodeProject

Are you ready for Microsoft’s brand-new enterprise tech conference, Microsoft Ignite? As a long-time exhibitor at Microsoft’s other individual shows, we are excited to see what’s buzzing and meet with other software developers, project managers, integrators and exhibitors. If you are planning to attend and have yet to set up a meeting with our representatives at the conference, please send an email to Ignite-2015@leadtools.com to reserve some time with our imaging experts!

Microsoft Ignite Details

May 4 – 8, 2015
Chicago, IL
Booth # 516

In case you missed our first blog post announcing our plans to exhibit at Microsoft Ignite, we will be showcasing our entire LEADTOOLS Version 19 product line which will help developers create applications for many of the conference’s themes and talking points including cloud infrastructure, big data, mobility and more.

• HTML5 / JavaScript Viewers
• Web Scanning with TWAIN
• Web Services
• Distributed Processing
• Document Converter
• Document Viewer
• OCR
• Barcode
• Forms Recognition and Processing
• DICOM
• PACS
• HL7
• Multimedia

CodeProject

Today, we are happy to announce a major update to LEADTOOLS Version 19. Special focus was given to the LEADTOOLS Document and Medical Imaging engines, each of which we will cover in a blog post.

First up, let’s take a look at what’s new in the Document Imaging Engine:

OCR

• Faster deskew on high resolution (600DPI and greater) images
• Memory optimizations for auto zoning algorithm (up to 60%)
• Improved paragraph, font and zone detection
• Support for vertical text zones
• Detect vertical and horizontal table cell direction
• Text Book option which enhances graphic zone detection through cleaning of noisy texts
• Memory and speed enhancements for Advantage OCR engine’s Native spell checker
• Native x64 support for Professional OCR engine
• Rotation angle support for all engines

Forms

• Improved invoice recognition accuracy

Documents SDK

• Convert and Save documents with the zero-footprint HTML5 Document Viewer
• Faster SVG and raster image rendering, thumbnail generation and bookmark extraction in Document Viewer
• Faster OCR and SVG conversion using multi-threading in the Document Converter
• Support for ZIP compression in the Document Converter
• Enhanced output for PDF and Word
• Support for vertical text zones
• SVG viewing and conversion support for HTML, RTF and TEXT
• DOCX and PPTX support for Windows Phone 8.1

Annotations

• Faster DirectX rendering engine for WPF and WinRT
• Fill objects with linear gradient brush
• Improved clip drawing for objects outside container bounds
• Draw and edit annotations at the same time
• Drag and drop for multiple containers
• Pan and zoom objects while they are still selected
• Select objects using extended key
• Advanced text editor for HTML5 annotations
• RenderedObjectBounds property for calculating real bounds

Barcode

• Perspective correction for PDF417 barcode
• More accurate detection for corrupted barcodes
• Improved detection of small 1D linear barcodes

Formats

• XMP metadata
• Read metadata from Office and vector formats

Web Scanning

• Send and receive user data to scanning service and upload server
• Customization options for scanning service

Stay tuned to see a list of new features and updates to our Medical Imaging SDKs. To read more about this exciting update, see the official press release!

Everybody has a smartphone in their pocket. With today’s technology there is no reason to carry around a smartphone, business card scanner and a receipt scanner; just use the camera on your phone!

Scan Anything, Anywhere, Any Time
Scan anything, anywhere, any time. That is the dream for many people, and today’s technology is making that a reality. Using a camera such as those on smartphones to capture information provides flexibility and can do things that a traditional scanner cannot. With the right image processing tools, a camera can capture receipts, documents, business cards, whiteboards, large format drawings, periodical pages and of course snapshots of business associates and friends with extremely high quality.

Before telling clients to stop using receipt and business card scanners and exclusively use cameras, developers need to understand the major differences between cameras and scanners as well as the effects of those differences on the captured images.

Read the white paper to learn how to eliminate these differences.

In addition to the PDF download format, we have also published this white paper on CodeProject.

Before Recognition

Successful Recognition

Recognized First Try

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD’s depth of features and ease of use. Today’s project comes from Faris.

What it Does

This project will perform various image cleanup functions until a barcode is recognized using LEADTOOLS Version 19. To run the project, extract it to the C:\LEADTOOLS 19\Examples\DotNet\CS directory.

Features Used

• Barcode
• Image Processing
• Document Cleanup

Development Progress Journal

My name is Faris and I’m going to create a program which will try recognizing a barcode. If it fails, it will perform different image processing operations on the loaded image then try again after each operation. The total number of tries is 4. The image processing operations are stacked on the same image. The image processing is done to clean-up the barcode for the barcode engine to recognize since unclear images tend to not be recognized from the first try.

In this project, I will use LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDK and program using .NET C# programming language. LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDK provides me with the ability to read 1D and 2D barcodes and also the ability to perform image processing operations. The reading operation will go through 4 steps: read the barcode as is without any modification, increase the image’s size and Dots per Inch (DPI) if its resolution is below 300 DPI, perform auto-binarize operation on the image and change its bits per pixel (BPP) to 1, and finally perform the Minimum image processing algorithm on the image.

If all 4 steps fail, then no barcode was recognized.

Note that this is not considered a complete solution for all cases, but rather a template that can be customized based on the nature of images typically present in a work environment. If these 4 steps are used with the wrong images, they may actually worsen the image rather than improve it.

First, I will start with a new WinForms application in Visual Studio 2010. In the form, I will add a menu, a Rich Textbox to show the operation currently being performed by the program, and our ImageViewer component to view the loaded image. I will also add the needed SDK references for loading and processing the image, and for barcode functionality.

I have now added the needed code to load the image, which only took me a few minutes because our SDK greatly simplifies loading almost any type of image on Earth.

To read a barcode, I will need to use LEADTOOLS BarcodeEngine class.
Documentation: BarcodeEngine class

The barcode can be easily read using a single line of code with ReadBarcode method.
Documentation: ReadBarcode

The program will look in all symbologies and in both horizontal and vertical directions. The directions should be set using BarcodeReadOptions class. As I haven’t used that class often, I’m using the example in our online help documentation to set the default barcode options except for the barcode direction, which I will change to use both horizontal and vertical.
Documentation: BarcodeReadOptions

After about one hour, basic barcode reading for all types is ready. Next, I will add the different processing features.

In my code, I’m using a switch statement to go through the current iteration. Reading is done after every operation, which means placing ReadBarcode method outside the scope of switch case. The first case (case 1) is not taken into consideration as nothing will be changed on the current loaded image.

For the other cases, I used the corresponding Command class with the image processing operation:

• ResizeCommand class to resize the image. (Note: This does NOT affect the DPI, so I change the DPI using the XResolution and YResolution properties of the RasterImage object)
• AutoBinarizeCommand class to convert the image to B/W then ColorResolutionCommand class to change the image’s BPP.
• MinimumCommand class to dilate dark objects.

The commands mentioned above helped me apply image processing operations with only a few lines of code. Also, LEADTOOLS’ online help documentation provided me with a small code snippet to use as a reference or to take it as is. For example, here’s the help topic for the MinimumCommand class:
Documentation: MinimumCommand

This part is now done and it took about one hour of work.

Next I will be finishing the interface and finalizing exception handling and user interaction.

This took about an hour and a half and I’m now satisfied with how the program looks and interacts.

Lastly comes testing, for which I will use different images with barcodes.

This part took more time than the previous steps combined. The LEADTOOLS barcode engine itself is powerful, so many of the images I tested with did not need my processing functions. I also tested on multiple images which were of poor quality, and the program managed to clean them up using the image processing operations I implemented. To completely test the application, I had to take an image with a barcode in it, then lower its quality using different processing techniques so as to go through all implemented image processing operations. All testing took about 4 hours.

The total amount of time taken to develop, debug and test the application from scratch was 7 and a half hours. Without LEADTOOLS SDK helping me finish all functionality coding in only 2 hours, this application would not have been possible to finish in a single day’s work.

Download the Project

The source code for this sample project can be downloaded from here.

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD’s depth of features and ease of use. Today’s project comes from Nathan.

What it Does

This C project will perform OCR, barcode recognition and file conversion using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

Features Used

• OCR
• Barcode
• File Formats
• Linux

Development Progress Journal

Hello, my name is Nathan and I am going to write a Linux application that combines OCR, barcode recognition, and file conversion into one batch processing application. It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a program in C so this should be fun!

Since I already have the LEADTOOLS SDK installed, I’m going to start with something simple to get my C gears turning. I’ll start by doing input verification, as I want to make sure the user uses the application properly and print out how to use it if they don’t.

That took a couple hours and I think I have input down pat. I’m going to store all of the options in a struct and then call functions that will do all the LEADTOOLS stuff from a header file if the flags are passed.

I’m going to go ahead and write a makefile that links all the libraries we’re going to need in this program so I don’t have to fiddle with compiling anymore and just type “make.”

Now I’m going to write a function that does file conversion. It’ll take a char * for source and target directories, intended format and then a struct to communicate the type with LEADTOOLS.

That only took about 45 minutes! I ran into some issues when opening directories, but it only took about 35 lines of code. That includes all the code we need to convert every file in our source directory, which is pretty amazing for C.

Now that I have that working, I’m going to write a function for barcode recognition.

That took about an hour and a half. Barcode recognition was a little trickier because I needed a couple helper functions to call from within. Even still, it wasn’t too bad and now my program can handle any barcode and it will write the data to a text file. And I can now do file conversion and barcode recognition from all the files by just passing both flags as command line arguments, that’s pretty sweet.

Now last but not least, I need to do OCR, which is a really complex thing to do!

That took about 3 hours since I’m not the most C-savvy person. Now I can OCR any image from the directory and output the text to a .txt file.

I need to do some code cleaning and commenting but this should only take about 20 minutes.

That wraps things up and brings me in at less than 8 hours. In one work day I was able to write a batch processing application that can do OCR, barcode recognition and file conversion, all in one. This is extremely useful for Linux users! Write a script to run this application and you can automate a lot of work.

In a future release, I’d probably like to separate some of my code into functions, do some multi-threading for performance, and allow for the int versions of the format constants or the common terms (tif, jpg, png, etc..) to be used.

Download the Project

The source code for this sample project can be downloaded from here.

Visual Studio Magazine announced the winners of its 22nd annual Reader’s Choice Awards. The 2015 winners were chosen by the readers of Visual Studio Magazine and honor the best Visual Studio-related tools and services in 31 categories.

LEAD Technologies is proud to be awarded Gold in two categories and Bronze in a third.

The awards are based on the responses of hundreds of Visual Studio Magazine subscribers. An e-mail invitation was sent to subscribers and responses were collected from Sep. 23 to Oct. 13, 2015. The online ballot, which was compiled by the editors of Visual Studio Magazine, included more than 400 products.

LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
Gold in Component: Imaging, Image Processing & Drawing Tools

Document Imaging Suite
Gold in Component: Multi-Document Processing

LEADTOOLS Barcode Pro
Bronze in Component: Text, OCR, Scanning & Barcode

LEAD is thankful to its many loyal customers that support LEAD and LEADTOOLS.

To see the full article from Visual Studio Magazine, you can download the PDF from their website.

Have you ever gone to a business for the first time and they hand you an iPad to enter your personal information? Did you enjoy that process or did it feel painfully slow? Or what about talking to the clerk at the desk having to repeat or spell out your name, address, etc., then get asked for your driver’s license to confirm? I recently ran into these kinds of check-in processes at several businesses and it got me thinking about how LEADTOOLS could seriously speed this up and make everyone’s lives better.

My thought is, if I’m already showing you my driver’s license, why do I have to keep filling this stuff out every visit? Other than my phone number and signature, everything they are asking me for is on there. LEADTOOLS can extract the data from the front of the license with its forms-based Driver’s License Recognition. And my NC driver’s license (along with many other states) has a PDF417 barcode that has all the same information on the front of the card. Both of these options are much faster than I can peck away on an iPad, and the required picture can be taken with the embedded camera.

Thus spawned the idea for our latest white paper:

Capturing Customer Information from Driver’s Licenses using LEADTOOLS
A wide variety of businesses are embracing technology as a means to enhance the way customers provide their information on the front-end of the customer service process. Upon arrival at the doctor’s office, car dealership, gym or even a restaurant, customers might be handed a tablet or directed to a kiosk to check in. This is an exciting change for device manufacturers and software developers, but does it always translate to better customer service? An ideal solution would rapidly capture information from a document or form of ID customers already have on them such as a driver’s license. This white paper will explore how programmers can use LEADTOOLS Driver’s License Recognition or Barcode Recognition to extract identifying information from driver’s licenses.

Last week we touched briefly on the new Java libraries in our post about the latest Document Imaging features for Linux in LEADTOOLS. Today we’ll take a closer look at what the LEADTOOLS April update has for Java programmers as a whole, because it extends far beyond just Linux and document imaging.

The recent LEADTOOLS Version 19 update added far-reaching Java support for both Windows and Linux operating systems. These new, highly-requested imaging libraries for Java include functionality for nearly all markets and imaging technologies that LEADTOOLS is known for:

• Viewers
• Image formats
• Compression
• Image processing
• Document Viewer and Converter
• OCR
• Barcode
• Annotations
• DICOM

With Java comfortably holding one of the top spots in the world among programming languages, there are bound to be a huge number of developers and project managers ready and searching for ways to add imaging technology to their existing applications. This much is true from our conversations with customers looking for OCR, barcode, image conversion, and the like. We are happy to fill that need for the many Java development shops out there.

Also, Java developers working on new projects will be ready to create just about any application their clients might need on Linux and Windows. These new libraries closely resemble their .NET counterparts, which means if your goal is to port an existing application to the Java platform, you’ll have a fairly smooth transition.

Click here to learn more about LEADTOOLS Imaging Technology for Java.

Do you develop mobile apps for iOS or Android? If so, read up because this is pretty exciting stuff. Even if you aren’t currently a mobile app developer, chances are you’ve thought about it and this might pique your interest even more. LEADTOOLS 19 has been released for Android, iOS, and OS X development platforms!

Below is a summary of the big stuff included in this release. We’ll go into more details on some of the features in the coming weeks, such as the improvements we made to the OCR and Barcode engines.

Upgraded OCR, Barcode, and Document Writers

Previously running strong on LEADTOOLS Version 18, this release brings the LEADTOOLS Android, iOS, and OS X development libraries up to Version 19. With Version 19, developers gain access to vastly upgraded OCR and Barcode technologies. Additionally, the Document Writers, which are used by the OCR engine to save document formats, have been updated to bolster format support, including the addition of PDF and DOCX formats. Using Version 19 OCR as a foundation, LEADTOOLS mobile developers now have access to LEADTOOLS Driver’s License Recognition and Passport Recognition technologies. LEAD’s expert image processing and recognition developers have also significantly improved the speed and accuracy of LEADTOOLS recognition technologies on devices with fixed-focus digital cameras still found on many popular devices. LEADTOOLS recognition technology eliminates the obstacles associated with mobile recognition and is the most robust and comprehensive solution available.

Credit Card Recognition

The new Credit Card Recognition SDK technology in LEADTOOLS provides a high-level framework to extract numerical data from credit cards. Utilizing the built-in camera on Android and iOS smart phones, developers can easily capture the credit card number and expiration date for use in their payment processing workflows. This new Credit Card API is a great addition for LEADTOOLS customers already utilizing existing recognition technologies such as MICR, OCR, and Driver’s License Recognition to build a full-scale payment processing solution that can handle a wide variety of input documents and cards.

Additional New Features for Mobile

With this upgrade, LEADTOOLS mobile SDKs have an even broader support for imaging features than ever before. The number of supported formats that can be loaded and saved has tripled from the previous version and now includes support for new raster, vector, and document formats such as CALS, DWG, PDF, and DOCX. The powerful and time-tested LEADTOOLS Annotation and Image Markup technology is now available for Android, iOS, and OS X development. By utilizing LEADTOOLS Annotation technology, developers can create mobile applications for users to markup images on a separate presentation layer or permanently change the image data. Be sure to try these and other mobile LEADTOOLS technologies by downloading the updated LEADTOOLS demo apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play.

New Swift-Compatible API for iOS and OS X

LEAD reworked its Objective-C libraries from the ground up for a significantly improved experience for developers using Swift to create iOS and OS X applications. By taking advantage of new Objective-C features, such as generics and nullability, developing applications with LEADTOOLS in Swift is easier and more natural. Enhancing the ability to program with Swift appeals to a wider audience of app developers, and helps current LEADTOOLS customers modernize their codebases.

Our mobile team has been very busy the past couple of months working on our Android, iOS, and Windows Phone apps. Not only has the recognition speed and quality been greatly increased, the UI has been redesigned as well. To honor their hard work, and to show you how easy it is to use LEADTOOLS SDKs to create high-quality mobile capture and recognition apps, we’ve published a new video to our YouTube channel!

This video is especially fun since we recorded the actual screen from an Android device. In other words, this isn’t an animation but a real showcasing of LEADTOOLS Mobile Capture. Recognition technologies featured in this video include OCR, Barcode, MICR (Check), ID (Driver’s License), and Credit Card. Since the recording of this video, we have also published a Passport Recognition sample application for Android with an iOS and Windows Phone version coming soon!

Visual Studio Magazine today announced the winners of its 23rd annual Reader’s Choice Awards. The 2016 winners are chosen by the readers of Visual Studio Magazine and honor the best Visual Studio- and .NET Framework-related tools and services in 36 categories.

LEAD had a very strong presence in 2016, winning two gold medals and one silver medal in three categories.

The awards are based on the responses of hundreds of Visual Studio Magazine subscribers. An e-mail invitation was sent to subscribers and responses were collected from Aug. 6 to Sep. 2, 2016. The online ballot, which was compiled by the editors of Visual Studio Magazine, included more than 400 products.

LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite
Gold in Multi-Document Processing

LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
Gold in Imaging, Image Processing and Drawing

LEADTOOLS Recognition Imaging
Silver in Text, OCR, Scanning & Barcode

LEAD is thankful to its many loyal customers that support LEAD and LEADTOOLS.

To see the full article and learn more about Visual Studio Magazine’s annual awards, read the press release.

One-by-one we’ve been introducing some of the upcoming updates to LEADTOOLS V19 Document and Medical technologies. These updates will include a market-first DICOM Hanging Protocol implementation as well as the fastest Form Recognition and Processing engine in the world! Additionally, the upcoming update includes new features for the HTML5 Zero-footprint Medical Web Viewer, DICOM Storage Server, Recognition Engines, Document Viewer, Document Formats, Linux, and Credit Card Reader.

This post is about the new features coming to the various LEADTOOLS recognition engines:

We are continuing to enhance the top-notch performance of LEADTOOLS OCR, Forms, OMR, and Barcode engines. We are improving the speed of the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine by as much as 67%. Additionally, following on significant improvements in the recognition results for English, French, and Japanese released earlier this year, LEAD’s OCR team is improving the recognition results of images containing German and Spanish character sets. Also, we are updating the Forms engine with a new forms recognition algorithm that is specifically designed for customers with large master form repositories. In testing with a repository of 1000 master forms, the time required to determine a form’s identity is dropping from 16 seconds with the current recognition method to less than 2 seconds using the upcoming implementation. Further, we are adding a new OMR form alignment option in the OMR engine for forms that include a timing pattern. We are also adding support in the Barcode engine to find and decode GS1 Composite symbols, including CC-A, CC-B, and CC-C. A GS1 Composite symbol is a combination of a linear barcode that encodes the item’s primary identification, which is associated with an adjacent 2D barcode that encodes additional supplementary data.

Click here for more information on LEADTOOLS Recognition as well as other Document engine technologies.

For more information or to be notified when these new features are available, contact support@leadtools.com As a reminder, this update will be available at no additional cost to all registered LEADTOOLS Version 19 and current maintenance customers. Contact LEAD to see if you are eligible to receive these updates.

Information concerning the other new features and announcements mentioned above will be provides in future posts. Stay tuned for more information!

The LEADTOOLS Imaging SDK for iOS, macOS, and Android had a significant update recently! Across the board, the OCR engine has been made 3-6x faster and the demo UI was given a significant redesign. In addition, each platform has its own set of platform-specific updates.

Android

• Barcode demo code was rewritten, resulting in a much faster implementation
• Added support for android.hardware.camera2, which means live capture support for all modern devices

Apple

• ALL libraries are now dynamic
• Updated interface for better Swift compatibility

If you want to try the latest version, you can download from here. Additionally, we have various sample applications on the App Store and Google Play available as well.

Finally, if you have any questions or would like a consult on your project, feel free to leave a comment here or contact support.

Today, we uploaded a new setup with some fantastic new features and improvements to LEADTOOLS Version 19. With a heavy focus on Document and Medical technologies, some of these features are unprecedented for the commercial SDK marketplace. Also, some speed improvements are approaching the 10x faster mark! Here are some of the major updates to pique your interest:

• First Commercial DICOM Hanging Protocol SDK
• HTML5 Zero-footprint Medical Web Viewer – New Features and Enhancements
• DICOM Storage Server – New Features
• More Efficient Handling of DICOM Pixel Data
• Recognition SDK Technology – Enhancements to OCR, Forms & OMR, and New Composite Barcode Recognition
• Document Viewer – New Features and Enhancements
• Document Formats – Enhanced Support
• Credit Card Reader SDK – Supported on More Platforms

You should take a moment to read the whole announcement to really get a grasp on how big this release is. Better yet, start downloading it first, then start reading about this exciting update; it is a free update for V19 users after all!

LEADTOOLS is Ready for Visual Studio 2017, Are You?

With this update, LEAD Technologies added some extra-special free guacamole to your coding burrito:

LEADTOOLS Version 19 is now Visual Studio 2017 compatible!

In case you were unaware, Visual Studio 2017 will be coming out in one week! This marks the 20th anniversary of Visual Studio, and as long-standing Visual Studio Partners, we are excited to contribute to the launch. In fact, we will be hosting a live stream of the Visual Studio 2017 launch right here on the LEADTOOLS Blog on March 7th at 11AM EST/8AM PST. Keep an eye on our blog and twitter feed that morning and tune in!

This post is part of our 2017 Developer App Series, which showcases apps created by our Support Agents over the course of eight weeks. These apps are intended to be larger, more thoughtful apps with highly practical purposes in mind, as opposed to a basic “how to” for a feature.

App Description

This project from Faris will allow the user to generate a readable QR Code using the LEADTOOLS Barcode SDK alongside the LEADTOOLS Annotations SDK to add a picture or logo inside the barcode while still keeping the barcode readable.

Features Used

• QR Code
• Annotations

Instructions for Running the App

1. Download the source code for this app from here
2. Extract the contents to the C:\LEADTOOLS 19\Examples\DotNet\CS directory.
3. Build csproj file with Visual Studio and run

This post is part of our 2017 Developer App Series, which showcases apps created by our Support Agents over the course of eight weeks. These apps are intended to be larger, more thoughtful apps with highly practical purposes in mind, as opposed to a basic “how to” for a feature.

App Description

This project from Nick Villalobos will utilize the LEADTOOLS Imaging and Document SDK to show a simple Java Image Viewer in addition to recognizing barcodes or performing OCR on the image.

Features Used

• Viewer Control
• Barcode
• OCR

Instructions for Running the App

1. Download the source code for this app from here
2. Extract the contents to any directory.
3. Run Eclipse and go to File > Import
4. Choose ‘Existing Projects into Workspace’
5. Pass the root directory created in step 2
6. Set your license and key in ImageViewer.java lines 94 & 95
7. Run as Java Application