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.

Some things you just have to see to believe, and we think that LEADTOOLS V19's new Invoice Recognition and Processing SDK is one of them. Now you can in our latest YouTube video!

If you have any familiarity with Forms Recognition and/or OCR, you may understand that those technologies typically rely on the master template and the document you wish to recognize having the same layout and proportions. Tax forms and applications fit this nicely since as long as the documents can get cleaned up and aligned, the zones and fields on the form to recognize will easily be found. Invoices, bills and other unstructured documents need special processing which LEADTOOLS masterfully developed and exposed in this new programmer-friendly toolkit. We hope you enjoy the video!

Whatever your image processing needs are, LEADTOOLS has a world-leading SDK to do all the heavy lifting. In previous posts we’ve discussed viewing images, saving images, combining images into a single file, and splitting a file into multiple images. LEADTOOLS also makes it possible to draw and edit annotations and markup objects on images.

Lately we've had some customers inquire about using LEADTOOLS Multimedia 18 with the Cloud SDK. This is a perfect choice since the conversion of audio/video files is what originally sparked the creation of our Cloud SDK. LEADTOOLS Multimedia V18 gives distributed processing application developers the most flexibility, features and performance with the latest codecs, processing filters, and the option to use either DirectShow or Media Foundation. This combination sets up LEADTOOLS as the unrivaled choice for parallel processing of multimedia conversion tasks.

In case you're new to the LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK, its greatest asset is the freedom it gives developers. While we include demos for OCR and Multimedia since those are the most popular kinds of distributed applications among our customers, the Cloud SDK is actually a completely independent framework. You don't have to use LEADTOOLS Multimedia, OCR, Image Processing, or really any LEADTOOLS imaging feature. LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK simply makes it easy to divide any job amongst an unlimited number of networked computers and get your job done faster and less expensively.

There are several ways to access the data in a RasterImage. If you need to get the RGB values of each pixel, then the GetPixel() and GetRow() methods are the simplest methods to use.

Few Pixels

If you need to get just one pixel, then GetPixel() is the easiest. GetPixel() works with image data of any bits per pixel and returns a RasterColor that includes the alpha channel information for 32 and 64 bit images. The sample below uses GetPixel()to fill the buffer with the entire image (not recommended—more on that below).