While we can talk all day about how great LEADTOOLS is, it's always meaningful to hear a review from an outside developer. Today, we're sharing with you a review of our LEADTOOLS OCR Module - LEAD Engine written by Jeffrey T. Fritz

I live in an older house that loves to bother me with the joys of home ownership and maintenance. Plumbing issues, strange electrical installation choices, and a 30-year-old furnace that burns oil. At first, the oil burner wasn’t a big deal because this meant I wasn’t paying for an electric heater. However, it did mean that my basement had a huge oil tank hiding in it that would need to be refilled on a regular basis during the cold winters. That shouldn’t be a problem... but I would never know the level of the oil in the tank unless I wandered down to the basement on a regular basis and checked the level by reading an old gauge mounted on the top of the tank.

As a technologist, this daily task of reading the oil tank gauge became tiresome and I had no way to know how quickly I was burning oil. What is the correlation between average daily temperature and the amount of oil my furnace burns? I wanted to solve the problem and started with a pad of paper and wrote down the daily readings. BORING! Who wants to read hard copy? I want this data on my phone, and I want to be collected without my daily trip to the basement to read the meter.

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.

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.

Few things have as great an impact on document imaging as cleanup. Its benefits reach far beyond the the improved visuals and readability. Document image cleanup is the salt to the meatier document imaging technologies like OCR, barcode, PDF, forms recognition, archival, and the like—it enhances them.

• Accuracy - Images are rarely perfect. Colors, angles, imperfections in the original document all have an affect on the accuracy of recognition technologies. By correctly aligning the image and removing obstacles around the important areas, the recognition processes can scan the image and look for the predictable patterns that make up the text and data that you wish to extract.
• Compression

One of the most foundational features in document imaging is image cleanup (also called preprocessing). When paper documents are scanned to digital form there are almost always imperfections. The paper can be at an angle, hole punches leave large black dots, folded paper introduces lines, and at the very least dust speckles litter small, dark dots throughout the image. All of these can have an adverse trickle-down effect on many other algorithms such as OCR, Forms, Barcode, Compression and more.

There is one caveat with most document imaging libraries: the document images must be black and white. While technically true for LEADTOOLS as well, it's not a limitation whatsoever. Each of the LEADTOOLS document cleanup functions return information on what it has done. For example, you can get the deskew angle, rectangle to crop, or region to fill and then apply those same operations on a color image: