Back by popular demand are LEAD white papers! There are many ways that we here at LEAD get the word out on how to use LEADTOOLS to create real-world solutions including this blog, CodeProject articles, support forums, code tips and the like. Lately we have had some requests for more in depth examples and solutions using LEADTOOLS which are best suited for a white paper format. So without further ado, here's a description of our first white paper in the upcoming series:

Using LEADTOOLS OCR to Enhance Google Drive Search
Google Drive is a wonderful service for storing, organizing and sharing files such as documents, photos and videos. However, TIFF and other raster image file formats can get easily lost because of the limited search capabilities. With LEADTOOLS, developers can use its OCR SDK to extract the text and then add it to the IndexableTextData for each item.

Our marketing department's media team has produced a new video highlighting the new and improved features within the LEADTOOLS OCR Engine in Version 18, including Faster Recognition, Zonal and Full Page Recognition, Image Over Text PDF, Tables and Cells, Dithered Text and Underlined Text Recognition. Take a couple minutes to learn about these exciting features, and we hope you enjoy the video!

We plan on releasing more videos just like this one covering other major feature sets like HTML5, PACS, DICOM, Barcode and more. As always, we welcome any feedback and would love to know what you think about our new videos, and/or let us know what you'd like to see next.

While making my rounds through the engineering department, the OCR team showed me some really impressive enhancements to the Advantage OCR engine coming soon. They've accomplished a lot, but my personal favorite is what they've done to the Advantage OCR engine's preprocessing algorithm. With much sweat, tears and coffee, they've fine-tuned the noise removal algorithm with impressive results. Other engines may have difficulty seeing between the lines (literally) when forms and documents use separator bars or boxes for individual characters. LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR Engine is doing a superb job at intelligently removing the noise and returning only the text of interest, rather than getting hung up on bars, dashes, speckles and other types of noise that should simply be ignored.

Other than the obvious benefit of improved accuracy, this is especially helpful for customers using forms recognition where character separators are prevalent. On documents where it might have been necessary to use a separate zone for each character and piece them together post-recognition, now only a single zone is needed since the separator bars and cells will no longer be taken into account.

With the recent release of Version 18, there is much to show off. I can't think of a better way than to dive into the new LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ libraries on The CodeProject. Check out our latest article in which we introduce Version 18 to The CodeProject community and show how to use OCR to extract text from an image on multiple platforms: .NET, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android.

Our existing .NET customers are already aware of how simple it is to OCR an image to searchable text in only a few lines of code, but did you know we brought that same programmer-friendliness to all of the new Anywhere™ platforms? One of the most impressive things about LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ is how hard our engineers worked to construct each development interface as similar as possible, making it easy to port your applications to multiple native platforms with less time and a greater ROI.