Recently, a customer needed to find the differences between two images. More specifically the customer needed to find what changed between the two images and crop to leave only the change. From there, the LEADTOOLS OCR engine converted the cropped image to text to create a screen reader for visually impaired users. Additionally, animation and compression algorithms use similar techniques to improve performance and efficiency.

Support quickly responded to the customer with a C# console application example that finds the bounding rectangle of the differences and then crops the image.

Blank page detection is an important step in most document imaging workflows. For example, it can be used to help end-users make sure they have their paper facing the correct way and inform them when they've done something wrong. For a more automated solution, blank pages can be removed to save on disk space and bandwidth.

However, the difficulty with blank page detection is that it can be a bit subjective. Humans can quickly perceive a blank page because we see that the page doesn't have any text on it. But what does a computer do with a text-less page with lines, noise, borders and the like?

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:

Microsoft Media Foundation is rapidly gaining ground as more and more people adopt the latest Windows Operating Systems. Naturally, it is growing in popularity among our customers since we released our Media Foundation SDK earlier this year.

LEADTOOLS includes high level controls for handling all of the core Multimedia functionality such as playback, capture and conversion. More advanced applications often implement transforms (previously known as filters in DirectShow) to add special processing to the audio and video streams. One of the most popular and flexible transforms in LEADTOOLS is the Video Callback Transform, which gives you direct access to the raw video data. With that data, and one of LEADTOOLS raster, document or medical imaging SDKs, the possibilities are quite endless.

Most image viewing applications and controls are designed for viewing a single image at a time. However some images and documents, such as TIFF and PDF, have multiple pages. Since these documents are typically full of text, it is very natural to keep reading on to the next page without the need to press a button to load the next page. We have received several requests for this feature and one of our developer support agents has created an demo showing how to implement continuous multipage scrolling with our HTML5 viewer and RESTful Web Services.

The basic idea works similarly to an image slider or carousel you might see on a homepage. There is an outer container which, when scrolled to a specified location, will asynchronously create an additional HTML5 Viewer for the next page and allow you to keep scrolling until you have reached the end of the document. Below is the JavaScript snippet which modifies the DOM with jQuery and calls the LEADTOOLS Raster Web service to retrieve the image.