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!

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:

LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK has made a name for itself by offering high level controls that take the complexity out of developing DirectShow and Media Foundation applications. Most core operations such as conversion, capture and playback can be done with only a few lines of code. In addition to the high level features, LEADTOOLS is flexible enough for any advanced application with more difficult scenarios and still offers as much or as little control as desired over the graphs and topologies under the hood.

The ConvertCtrl is a perfect example of this. By setting a source file, destination file and format you can make an audio/video conversion application in minutes. Developers who wish to dive deeper can supply their own media samples and process the conversion frame by frame.