Now that LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ has hit the market, LEAD Technologies is publishing several of its demos as free application utilities for the Windows Store, Google Play and the App Store. Below are the latest free WinRT apps approved for the Windows Store that showcase the award-winning LEADTOOLS technology such as formats, image processing, OCR, Barcode, DICOM and PACS. The source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processor
• LEADTOOLS OCR
• LEADTOOLS Barcode
• LEADTOOLS DICOM Viewer
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer

Publishing our demos to the respective mobile app markets for Windows, Android and Apple is much more than just another way to spread the word about LEADTOOLS Anywhere™. As many developers are aware, the approval processes for these stores are very stringent, especially when your application uses a third party SDK. By taking our demos through these approval processes, LEAD has gone the extra mile to ensure your development experience with LEADTOOLS is hassle-free.

In order to show off the new LEADTOOLS Anywhere ™ technology, LEAD recently published several free apps for WinRT on the Windows Store. Today, we are announcing three new Android apps approved for Google Play. Showing off nearly identical features as their WinRT siblings, these apps showcase not only the award-winning imaging technology for formats, image processing, OCR and Barcode, but show how easy it is to create native apps for multiple platforms with LEADTOOLS Anywhere™. The source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processing
• LEADTOOLS OCR Demo
• LEADTOOLS Barcode Demo
• LEADTOOLS DICOM Viewer Demo
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer Demo

We have more apps for iOS on the way and should hit the App Store any day now. If you're an Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod user, stay tuned for our next announcement for these exciting and free apps!

While making my rounds through the engineering department, the OCR team showed me some really impressive enhancements to the Advantage OCR engine coming soon. They've accomplished a lot, but my personal favorite is what they've done to the Advantage OCR engine's preprocessing algorithm. With much sweat, tears and coffee, they've fine-tuned the noise removal algorithm with impressive results. Other engines may have difficulty seeing between the lines (literally) when forms and documents use separator bars or boxes for individual characters. LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR Engine is doing a superb job at intelligently removing the noise and returning only the text of interest, rather than getting hung up on bars, dashes, speckles and other types of noise that should simply be ignored.

Other than the obvious benefit of improved accuracy, this is especially helpful for customers using forms recognition where character separators are prevalent. On documents where it might have been necessary to use a separate zone for each character and piece them together post-recognition, now only a single zone is needed since the separator bars and cells will no longer be taken into account.

We are very excited about the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™, and we've been inviting everyone to take advantage of our powerful multi-platform imaging technology by publishing free apps for WinRT, Android and today, iOS. Just like the WinRT and Android apps, these applications were fully approved for the App Store, and the source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processing
• LEADTOOLS OCR
• LEADTOOLS Barcode
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer

Now that LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ has successfully run the gauntlet for each app market for Windows, Android and Apple, developers using LEADTOOLS can rest easy knowing that one of the most crucial steps in their application development life-cycle has already been proven feasible, which is something not every third party SDK can guarantee.

I heard some exciting news from engineering today in regards to our WinRT barcode engine. Just over a month has passed since we released the WinRT SDK, and our hardworking document imaging experts have already revamped the barcode recognition algorithm in several key ways:

• Enhanced the barcode engine to produce optimum results in pictures taken from mobile devices
• New image preprocessing that resolves extreme shadows, lighting and 3D perspective skewing in images capture from cameras
• Faster recognition when reading barcodes from a video stream
• Enhanced internal binarization for color images and videos

All of these add up to superior accuracy and speed to what was already an outstanding product! To be more precise, the new algorithm is presented as a setting which means this has no impact on the previous algorithm if you are still using our barcode engine on scanned documents. These updates, as well as a free demo for the Windows Store, should be available shortly after the holidays!