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?".

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:

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 Nathan.

What is Does

This C project will perform OCR, barcode recognition and file conversion using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

This month's white paper is an extremely practical one. In fact, we even had a few conversations with customers at last week's HIMSS conference about this very subject. Document archival has been around for quite a while now, but as archives grow and systems become more spread out and the client device ecosystem is much more diverse, standardizing your document archival system is becoming critical.

If you have need for end-to-end PDF and PDF/A functionality including OCR, Virtual Printing, HTML5 viewing and more, you will benefit greatly from our March white paper!

Now that Version 18 has been out for a little over a month, we’ve received a lot of feedback about some of the features our customers are really excited about. This week I'm jumping into LEADTOOLS Multimedia Version 18, which is headlined by the addition of Media Foundation support and a new RTSP Server.

Media Foundation

LEAD Technologies has a strong record of keeping pace with the latest development platforms and technologies. Adding support for Microsoft Media Foundation is much more than just keeping up, it’s also a reflection of our commitment to making difficult development projects simple. In the same way that LEADTOOLS simplified and abstracted DirectShow application development, LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDKs now offer the same benefits for the new Microsoft Media Foundation framework with new components and transforms. Below is a list of controls, processors, codecs, multiplexers and demultiplexers that are supported in Microsoft Media Foundation: