Tonal range is an important attribute of an image, especially photographs, when trying to improve OCR results. Tonal range is the range of tones between the lightest and darkest areas of an image and is also known as contrast. An image with a wide range has both very dark (black) and very light (white) elements. An image with a narrow range is more limited in its tonal scope, which is usually in the mid-ranges (varying shades of grays).

Yesterday, we introduced LEADTOOLS Version 20 and its new development platforms to you. Today we're diving into the features.

Overall, the toolkit is faster and more efficient, and major areas of focus in this release were the Recognition Engines, Document Viewer, Document Formats, Medical Web Viewer, and Hanging Protocols.

Few things have as great an impact on document imaging as cleanup. Its benefits reach far beyond the the improved visuals and readability. Document image cleanup is the salt to the meatier document imaging technologies like OCR, barcode, PDF, forms recognition, archival, and the like—it enhances them.

• Accuracy - Images are rarely perfect. Colors, angles, imperfections in the original document all have an affect on the accuracy of recognition technologies. By correctly aligning the image and removing obstacles around the important areas, the recognition processes can scan the image and look for the predictable patterns that make up the text and data that you wish to extract.
• Compression

LEAD keeps pushing the limits with LEADTOOLS Version 19 and has released another update full of speed and accuracy optimizations throughout the product line. Though speed and accuracy is a major theme throughout this update, it isn't the only notable improvement. Many completely new features, tools, and support for new specifications are also included. Check out the list below for the full run-down on what our LEADTOOLS developers have been up to, making sure you have the world's leading imaging SDK at your fingertips.

This post is part of our 2017 Developer App Series, which showcases apps created by our Support Agents over the course of eight weeks. These apps are intended to be larger, more thoughtful apps with highly practical purposes in mind, as opposed to a basic "how to" for a feature.

App Description

This app uses the LEADTOOLS Barcode Engine alongside the LEADTOOLS Image Processing SDK to concurrently run different image processing algorithms in a multithreaded environment on a barcode image until the barcode can be found in one thread and cancel the others. This will help decode barcodes on particularly difficult images by doing 5 sets of image processing commands at the same time that are each optimized to find barcodes on commonly difficult images.