Introduction

A wide variety of businesses are embracing technology as a means to enhance the way customers provide their information on the front-end of the customer service process. Upon arrival at the doctor's office, car dealership, gym or even a restaurant, customers might be handed a tablet or directed to a kiosk to check in. This is an exciting change for device manufacturers and software developers, but does it always translate to better customer service?

If the process is difficult or takes too long, customers are likely to get annoyed, or worse, take their business elsewhere. Therefore using technology for technology's sake isn't enough. To get the most out of their investment, business owners can use various imaging technologies to capture customer information to speed up the process and improve customer satisfaction. An ideal solution would capture information from a document or form of ID customers already have on them such as a driver's license. This white paper will explore how programmers can use LEADTOOLS Driver's License Recognition or Barcode Recognition to extract identifying information from driver's licenses.

If you’ve renewed your driver’s license any time in the last few years, you have likely noticed an increase in its visual complexity. Many governing bodies have made significant strides towards making forgery more difficult. The unfortunate side-effect from that positive change is that traditional recognition algorithms are more difficult with the many colors, backgrounds, holograms, and layouts.

Our latest white paper contains a wealth of information on selecting the right barcode for your application. There are an abundance of barcode types and sub-types, so choosing correctly from the outset can have a profound impact on your application's entire development life cycle. Common problems could be using a barcode that doesn't hold enough information, is too rigid for evolutions in your application, takes up too much physical space, fails to read when damaged, and so on.

After an introduction into different types of barcodes and their uses, this white paper then helps navigate implementing them into your application. Not all barcode SDKs are created equal, and we dive into the many advantages — both for the developer and eventual end-user — of trusting LEADTOOLS in your application. We hope you enjoy the read!

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!