One of the most important aspects of documents and record-keeping is the ability to redact sensitive information. Originally done permanently with blank ink on paper, the need for redaction certainly carried over into document imaging as processes and archives started going paperless. LEADTOOLS has many ways to redact documents, but today we're going to look at an example you might not have thought of before and would be right at home within any ECM or eDiscovery application.

It's easy to take compression for granted with the availability of cheap storage. Many of the common file formats used in many applications are intrinsically compressed as well, like JPEGs and PNGs. However, when you get into the Medical Imaging market and the prevalent DICOM file format, it is a very different ballgame. Like any good preschooler, you might be asking, "Why?".

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

You might already know from our monthly code tips newsletter or from personally working with our awesome technical support team (which is freely available to all customers and those evaluating LEADTOOLS as well), but all of our Developer Support Agents are programmers too! From time to time, we like to put their dev skills to work and let them express their creative sides. In honor of LEAD's 25th anniversary, we had a special series to show how easy it is to create a variety of applications with LEADTOOLS. That series had such positive feedback that we want to keep it going.

This year, we will be showcasing a great set of features including OCR, Barcode, Forms, Annotations, Java, Multimedia Capture, DVR, and more. The apps created by our Support Agents in this Developer App Series are intended to be larger, more thoughtful apps with highly practical purposes in mind, as opposed to a basic "how to" for a feature. The programmer-friendliness of LEADTOOLS shines through in these apps and could be a genuine foundation for your next imaging development project.

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 app uses the LEADTOOLS Barcode Engine alongside the LEADTOOLS Image Processing SDK to concurrently run different image processing algorithms in a multithreaded environment on a barcode image until the barcode can be found in one thread and cancel the others. This will help decode barcodes on particularly difficult images by doing 5 sets of image processing commands at the same time that are each optimized to find barcodes on commonly difficult images.