LEADTOOLS 17.0 Icon

Known worldwide as the #1 Imaging toolkit developer, LEAD is pleased to release LEADTOOLS Version 17.0, an extensive offering of new imaging technology and enhancements.  A substantial portion of LEADTOOLS functionality, including image format load and save, image processing, compression, display, effects, and annotation is optimized to support 100% pure Silverlight development and can be used in Silverlight without external dependencies or server calls.  LEAD also now offers a .NET class library solution and x64 OS support for all functionality across the Document, Medical, Multimedia, and Raster imaging engines.  LEADTOOLS 17.0 also includes an all new Medical 3D engine, an Arabic OCR engine and major enhancements to OCR, Forms Recognition, and Medical/PACS modules. This new version is especially suitable for developers in the document, medical, and multimedia imaging communities who are looking for advanced imaging features and tools for rapid development with the stability, performance, and support LEADTOOLS customers have come to expect.

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Document Engine

  • Windows Phone 7 SDK - Develop applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform
  • WPF and Silverlight Annotations now support Rich Text and Audio/Video Objects
  • Multi-touch support for Silverlight Windows Phone
  • Accelerated performance of the Silverlight SDK
  • OCR Auto-Recognize enhancements for infinite pages, multithreading, preprocessing, and logging
  • Added support for Microsoft Office 2007 formats: Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), and PowerPoint (.pptx)
  • Table Detection and Handling support added to the OCR Professional engine
  • Support for JBIG2 files with non-sequential headers (random-access)
  • Optimized internal core functions to dramatically increase the speed of image handling and processing
  • New Silverlight viewers—Image viewer, image list, pan window, and magnifying glass pixel shader
  • New Silverlight codecs—Load, save, and convert more than 100 formats and subformats, including TIFF, JBIG, JBIG2, IOCA, FAX (CCITT Group3/4), JPEG 2000, JPEG, BMP, CALS, GIF, PNG, TGA, DICOM, and EXIF, in Silverlight clients
  • New Silverlight image processing functions—Process images on Silverlight clients with more than 130 advanced image processing functions, including bicubic and favor black resize, border, dot, hole punch, and line removal
  • New Silverlight annotations—Load, save, create, and edit image annotations (markups) in Silverlight clients. Annotation object types include Rectangle, Ellipse, Highlight, Line, Redact, Text, Ruler, Protractor, CrossProduct, Image, TextPointer, Point, Curve, Point, Polygon, and Polyline
  • New Silverlight pixel shaders—Apply visual effects in Silverlight clients such as magnify glass, sharpen, brightness and contrast adjustments, edge detection, and more
  • Load PowerPoint and XLS files as images
  • Save linearized PDF and PDF/A files
  • Export LEADTOOLS annotations as PDF documents
  • Create PDF bookmarks
  • New text orientation options to recognize vertical, left rotated, and right rotated text
  • New DOCX and XLSX output for OCR and Document Writers
  • Improved table detection in the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine
  • Enhanced font detection in the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine to include the detection of bold, italic, mono, and proportional spacing
  • Improved accuracy and speed of the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine
  • Expanded constrained ICR support to be included with the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine
  • New Forms Recognition and Processing applications with project source code to define master forms, and recognize and process forms

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Medical Engine

  • IPV6 support for DICOM Communication
  • .NET MedicalViewer control now has the option to use LEADTOOLS .NET annotations for simplified customization and management
  • Multi-language character support for loading and saving both ideographic and phonetic characters within the same DICOM element
  • Media Creation Management—Burn CDs/DVDs with DICOMDIR and full-featured viewer
  • New Workstation Viewer Layout option showing series thumbnails and selected full-size image
  • Store annotations on the server and load from any Workstation Client
  • Assign shortcut keys for modality-specific window level presets to quickly adjust the display for specific tissues or pathologies
  • Customizable patient orientation flips and rotates the image based on Patient Position, Modality, or any other DICOM Tag
  • Chronological Timeline with thumbnails of studies and series to save time reviewing patient history
  • Optimized overall performance and speed
  • Improved resource management, allowing multiple volumes to be opened at the same time
  • Improved SSD management allows to loading multiple meshes at a time
  • Optimized internal core functions to dramatically increase the speed of image handling and processing
  • New Silverlight DICOM data set support—Create, load, view, edit, and save DICOM data sets, including pixel data, elements, and annotations, in Silverlight clients
  • New Silverlight viewers—Image viewer, image list, pan window, and magnifying glass pixel shader
  • New Silverlight codecs—Load, save, and convert more than 100 formats and subformats, including DICOM, TIFF, JBIG, JBIG2, IOCA, FAX (CCITT Group3/4), JPEG 2000, JPEG, BMP, CALS, GIF, PNG, TGA, and EXIF, in Silverlight clients
  • New Silverlight image processing functions—Process images on Silverlight clients with more than 130 advanced image processing functions, including Window Level, Multiscale Enhancement, Tissue Equalization, Adaptive Contrast, Unsharp Mask, Auto Segment, Digital Subtract, and Add Bitmaps
  • New Silverlight annotations—Load, save, create, and edit image annotations (markups) in Silverlight clients. Annotation object types include Rectangle, Ellipse, Highlight, Line, Redact, Text, Ruler, Protractor, CrossProduct, Image, TextPointer, Point, Curve, Point, Polygon, and Polyline
  • New Silverlight pixel shaders—Apply visual effects in Silverlight clients such as magnify glass, sharpen, brightness and contrast adjustments, edge detection, and more
  • New Medical 3D module—Construct and view a 3-dimensional volume from a set of homogeneous 2-dimensional medical images. Provides several rendering methods and tools for advanced visualization, including MPR, VRT, MIP, MinIP, and SSD. Viewing options include planes, clip, slab, scale, zoom, threshold, image processing, and full camera control. 3D rendering can be stand-alone or hosted in the high-level LEADTOOLS Medical Image Viewer control to leverage the built-in tools and automation provided by the viewer control
  • New support included with the LEADTOOLS PACS Framework:
  • Updates to the LEADTOOLS PACS Workstation Framework
    • Added support to create, manipulate, and render 3D volumes from DICOM stacks
    • Added cut-plane on 2D DICOM slices to generate 3D volumes with interactive support for positioning, orientation, and volume thickness
    • Added DICOM series reference line and orientation tag support
    • Added extensive options to control the process of DICOM image storage into the Workstation database with the ability to generate images with different formats
    • Enhanced Workstation listener service logging and added new event log viewer
  • New Print to PACS application with project source code—Captures image data from printer driver, TWAIN, WIA, image file, clipboard, or screen capture and then saves the resultant DICOM file to disk or stores it to PACS using C-STORE. Includes options to get the required metadata from manual entry, Modality WorkList, or PACS Queries
  • Updates to layout control in the LEADTOOLS Medical Viewer
    • Supports unconstrained (non-grid) cell layouts
    • Cells can host other WinForm controls such as the InternetBrowserControl
    • Cells can be hosted by other WinForm controls
    • Added new 3D cell type to the Medical Image Viewer control to render and manipulate 3D volumes providing several rendering methods and tools for advanced visualization, including MPR, VRT, MIP, MinIP, and SSD. Viewing options include planes, clip, slab, scale, zoom, threshold, image processing, and full camera control
    • Added image overlapping
  • New image processing functions:
    • New tissue equalization function to enhance x-ray images by performing equalization between hard and soft tissues
    • New anisotropic diffusion function to enhance medical images by removing noise while maintaining image integrity
    • New auto segment image processing function to automatically segment CT and MRI images by shrinking a defined rectangular region onto objects in the image
    • New mean shift image processing filter to enhance images based on the color distance of a pixel and the pixels in a radius of inspection
  • New DICOM data set edit control
  • Import and export DICOM to XML to easily edit and compare DICOM data sets
  • Up to date DICOM IOD tables
  • New support for the Analyze medical file format

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Raster Engine

  • New File formats, including VFF (Sun TAAC Bitmap), PCL6, and JPM (JPEG 2000 part 6)
  • Multithread support in PDF Read Engine
  • Single DLL redist for PDF Read Engine
  • Automatically detect the best rasterization options by examining the contents of the PDF, including bits per pixel, original resolution, compression, and version
  • Added support for saving PDF version 1.6 files
  • Added support for Code 128 A, B, and C subtypes, including double density mode, to the Barcode 1D engine
  • New VC++ 2010 versions of C/C++ libraries
  • Optimized internal core functions to dramatically increase the speed of image handling and processing
  • .NET 4.0 binaries
  • New Visual Studio 2010 projects for all .NET and Silverlight sample applications
  • Enhanced WPF viewer controls
  • WPF Pixel Shaders
  • Added multi-monitor support to screen capture
  • Load PowerPoint files as an image
  • Load Word Doc files as an image
  • Load Excel XLS files as an image
  • Added folder watch feature to the LEADTOOLS Thumbnail Browser so that the Thumbnail Browser can automatically update when files are modified, added, or deleted to the folder

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Multimedia Engine

  • Support Local data set keys in MPEG2 transport (read and write)
  • Added support for Matroska (MKV) and WebM files
  • Added VP8 encoder/decoder
  • Ability to specify preferred source, demuxers, and decoders
  • Added a Video Stabilization filter
  • Added a Meta Viewer Object—It can be used to display metadata information (art cover, cast, release year, chapter information, etc) about DVD and video files. Similar to what Media Player shows when you insert a DVD
  • Updated RTSP source filter to support MPEG4, AMR, and G.711 audio
  • Added the ability to convert Raw AAC to MPEG2 Transport/Stream AAC without recompression—For example, convert MP4 files to .AAC audio files without recompressing
  • Video streaming modules will now use independent threads for sending video for the various connections. As a result, a slow connection will not slow down all the other computers connected to a video server
  • New 64-bit binaries for capture, conversion, and playback filters and codecs such as H.264, MPEG-4, and MPEG-2
  • New .NET class library for multimedia capture, conversion, and playback
  • New support to capture video from HD digital tuners
  • New LEAD RTSP source filter—Play RTSP streams in the following formats: H.264 video, JPEG video, and AAC audio
  • LEAD MPEG-2 Transport UDP Source accepts raw RTP streams

New additions and changes to the LEADTOOLS Product Line

With the release of LEADTOOLS Version 17, LEAD reinforces its position as the world leading developer of imaging and imaging related SDKs. LEAD is dedicated to being the only choice for developers who want a comprehensive and time-tested imaging SDK that stays at the forefront of new imaging technologies and development paradigms.