A few weeks ago, I was asked to help technical support with a new feature we are adding to our Media Streaming Server. Our developers added SSL to the Media Streaming Server, and technical support needed some SSL certificates for development and testing before we release it in mid-February.

Some years ago, I worked in the IT department, and I never delete anything. I just happened to have a few scripts that could help them streamline self-signed certificate creation.

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 Maen.

What it Does

This C# WinForms project will load/play both raster images and videos in the same window using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

Recently, a customer needed to find the differences between two images. More specifically the customer needed to find what changed between the two images and crop to leave only the change. From there, the LEADTOOLS OCR engine converted the cropped image to text to create a screen reader for visually impaired users. Additionally, animation and compression algorithms use similar techniques to improve performance and efficiency.

Support quickly responded to the customer with a C# console application example that finds the bounding rectangle of the differences and then crops the image.

Blank page detection is an important step in most document imaging workflows. For example, it can be used to help end-users make sure they have their paper facing the correct way and inform them when they've done something wrong. For a more automated solution, blank pages can be removed to save on disk space and bandwidth.

However, the difficulty with blank page detection is that it can be a bit subjective. Humans can quickly perceive a blank page because we see that the page doesn't have any text on it. But what does a computer do with a text-less page with lines, noise, borders and the like?

Saving the settings of your TWAIN device is a very important feature which is fully supported by LEADTOOLS. For the end-user, it allows them to load and save different scanning profiles and options they use on a regular basis such as "high resolution color photo", "medium quality black and white document", or "auto-cropped receipt". One caveat to this feature is that it saves all of the settings, which comes with a few downsides:

1. Large template files
2. Longer execution time
3. Most importantly...That template file will only work on one scanner

To alleviate these problems, LEADTOOLS now has a new overload for its TwainSession.SaveTemplateFile function which allows you to save a subset of settings rather than the entire collection. As long as you are saving core, mandatory settings that are supported by all TWAIN scanners, you can use these templates regardless of the hardware device being used!