Today we have released a new white paper which explains in great detail how to use our Forms Recognition and Processing to automatically classify a folder of documents. It describes a common problem where time and energy is lost through the organization of scanned or paperless bank statements, invoices and other documents, and how easy it is to solve it with LEADTOOLS. Our imaging SDKs are used in scenarios like this day in and day out, helping people and businesses be more efficient, organized and utilize their time on more enjoyable or productive tasks. It also offers several suggestions on how to enhance the basic application provided to achieve even greater things like cloud integration and large scale operations!

Automatically Classify Scanned Documents using LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition
Document imaging is certainly saving trees and physical storage space, but in some situations it fails to save much time or hassle. Opting in to paperless statements or manually scanning paper documents yourself is a great way to archive all of your bills, invoices, financial statements and the like. However, it still requires a fair amount of time and energy to thoughtfully organize the documents in your digital filing cabinet. Imagine being able to drop all of your scanned documents into a single folder and have all the work of moving and renaming the files in a logical, consistent manner done automatically. LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition and Processing fits the bill perfectly with its high level, flexible and powerful imaging libraries.

LEADTOOLS Version 18, also known as LEADTOOLS Anywhere™, is designed with the purpose of opening new opportunities and easing the development of high quality imaging applications that can run anywhere. Since V18's release earlier this year, we have published several articles on The CodeProject showing the benefits of using LEADTOOLS to create multi-platform, native apps for .NET, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android.

This month we are continuing that series and have written an article showing the beauty and simplicity of using LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ for barcode recognition. For each platform, it only requires a few simple lines of code to detect and recognize barcodes from still images and video streams. Head on over to The CodeProject, grab the latest evaluation for LEADTOOLS V18 and see for yourself how LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ can increase your mobile app's ROI.

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.