What's New in LEADTOOLS v17.5

Advanced PDF and Document Reader

LEADTOOLS now includes comprehensive PDF reading and viewing with advanced capabilities such as support for extraction of text, hyperlinks, bookmarks, and metadata. Developers can take advantage of these properties to enhance their applications with dynamic document viewing, editing, and assembly features.

The LEADTOOLS Document Readers allow reading images, thumbnails, text, and metadata from any supported document format, using a uniform set of methods and properties, regardless of the document type. The high-level LEADTOOLS Document Readers interface can be used to easily create feature-rich document viewing applications with unlimited zoom, smooth scrolling, thumbnails, metadata, and text search without the need to know any specifics about the format you are using.

Barcode

LEADTOOLS Barcode functionality has been expanded with a new set of libraries for Silverlight and Windows Phone. This addition makes it easier for developers creating web and mobile applications to implement barcode features, which previously required the use of an external server via WCF Services. Now Silverlight developers empowered by LEADTOOLS can develop robust and compelling barcode applications that run natively on their respective platforms.

In addition to the new platforms, LEADTOOLS boasts a redesigned Barcode .NET interface. This high-level and programmer friendly interface can read all barcodes in an image with a single function call. This intuitive new interface also handles the complexities of the extensive collection of barcode symbologies LEADTOOLS supports.

Cloud SDK

LEAD Technologies has a rich history of providing the fastest imaging development tools and staying ahead of the latest technology trends. Consequently, LEAD is pleased to introduce the all new LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK. This ground-breaking framework can be used for creating cloud-based, distributed computing applications with unlimited potential for speed and platform independence.

Utilizing their own existing network of servers and worker machines, developers can easily create any kind of distributed, grid, or parallel computing application such as OCR, Forms Recognition and Processing, Barcode Recognition, Audio/Video conversion and encoding, web crawlers, distributed graphics rendering, and more. By developing a LEADTOOLS cloud, processor intensive and time consuming tasks can be handled by your network of worker machines in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

CCOW

With the LEADTOOLS Clinical Context Object Workgroup (CCOW) SDK technology, application developers can easily add support for HL7's vendor independent Context Management Architecture standards. Context Management, popular among PACS and medical records systems, is a dynamic computer process that uses "subjects of interest" in one application to point to data in separate systems containing the same subject. The LEADTOOLS CCOW SDK provides high-level .NET components to quickly and easily develop robust Context Management solutions that tie together critical information scattered across multiple systems and disparate applications.

New Product - Multimedia Suite

This collection of powerful multimedia products from LEAD Technologies provides everything a developer needs to create enterprise level multimedia applications by bundling features from the Multimedia SDK, DVD Module, Video Streaming Module, MPEG-2 Transport Module, Imaging Pro SDK, and LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK.

• Detect, read, and write Barcodes in Silverlight and Windows Phone
• New high-level Barcode design for .NET simplifies adding support for all barcode types in your application without any special knowledge of barcode symbologies
• Dramatically increased barcode recognition speed by up to 9X
• Automated cleanup for barcodes
• PDF updates and improvements
  • PDF runtime now requires only a single DLL for distribution
  • Merge multiple PDF or Postscript files into a single PDF document
  • Split a PDF into multiple documents
  • Extract text with properties such as bounding rectangle, font information, and color
  • Extract hyperlinks, bookmarks, and internal links
  • Load and save PDF metadata such as Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, and Producer
  • New PDF Document Editor with extended support for adding, replacing, and deleting pages in any PDF file
  • Enhanced PDF encryption support
  • Convert Postscript files to PDF with full control over distiller, encryption, and compatibility settings
  • Convert existing PDF files to linearized PDFs (optimized for web viewing)
  • Convert existing PDF files to PDF/A-1B
  • Save fully customized UNICODE Bookmarks in PDF files
  • Added support for multithreaded PDF load
  • Added support for writing PDF 1.3 and 1.6
  • New PDF Info Extractor gets information about PDF version, image width, height, bit depth, compression, and DPI
• OCR Advantage Engine updates and improvements
  • AutoZone has been improved to provide fewer, more accurate zones, improving OCR results
  • Dramatically accelerated AutoZone detection, improving overall performance for OCR
  • Faster Advanced Table Detection, providing better performance when dealing with documents containing tables
  • New image preprocessing features to improve OCR results, including fixing broken letters, dithered text, inverted text, and more.
  • Now supports the following languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
  • Added support for built-in Spell checking, including NHunspell and Microsoft's System.Windows.Controls.SpellCheck engines
• Enhancements to Existing File Formats
  • Support for loading Office 2007 formats: DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX
  • Optimized load performance for DOC format
  • Added ability to load Office formats from memory
  • Added support for JBIG2 with non-sequential headers (i.e. random access)
  • Support for loading refinement segments in JBIG2 format
• Increased the speed of the Line Remove image processing function
• New ImageColorType function for detecting whether the image is mostly black and white, grayscale, or color
• Virtual Printer now supports network printing

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Engine.

• Medical Workstation now fully supports customization and localization. Users can easily change the look and feel or language strings of the Medical Workstation for re-branding or localization purposes.
• New Modality Worklist (MWL) and Modality Performed Procedure Step (MPPS) WCF Service Component for the PACS Framework
• Medical Image Viewer Features and Enhancements
  • Added options for customizing the border of cells in the viewer
  • Exposed more low-level annotation features
  • Image Orientation tag automatically updates based on the current image orientation
  • Added GetScale method, so user can get the current image scale value
  • Added feature to allow the user to change the active sub-cell programmatically
  • Added MatchScale method to allow users to make all the other cells match the scaling value of the specified cell
  • Added Cobb Angle annotation tool
  • Added user interface tools for Image Alpha: Sigmoid, Exponential, and Logarithmic
  • Added VirtualImage property, which allows the user to receive advanced details and status regarding the cell. This is useful for MPR, Derivative, and Low Memory Usage cells.
  • Empty cells with no assigned image can now be active, utilize tools, and display text/tags
  • Added Drag and Drop support for cells
  • New image display and scaling options: UseDpi, FitIfLarger, Stretch, Explode
  • New MPRType property to identify the axis for localization purposes
  • Advanced synchronization tools, including multiple series and viewer control instances
  • Added GetPage method to allow user to get the desired frame from any cell type
• 3D Features and Enhancements
  • Added support for Curved MPR/Panoramic Polygon
  • Added ability to generate and view Paraxial Cuts
  • Added the ability to programmatically set the index of the MPR cell
  • Added ImageLoaded event
• DICOM Features and Enhancements
  • New DLL dedicated to the internal DICOM tables, reducing deployment footprint
  • Ability to load DICOM tables from XML, simplifying customization, updating, and portability of IOD tables
  • Get and Set encapsulated documents from memory and disk
  • Added write support for YBR_FULL Photometric Interpretation with uncompressed and RLE-compressed DICOM image pixel data
  • Added support for DICOM JPEG-LS Lossy and Lossless transfer syntaxes

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Engine.

• Simplified redistribution of Multimedia .NET interface, which does not require registration
• Optimized Motion JPEG 2000 Codec to support multiple cores, making it up to 8x faster
• Optimized HD Capture and channel selection
• Push Windows Media Content to a Windows Media Server with new LEAD MMS Sink Filter included with the Video Streaming Module
• New LEAD RLE Decoder for play or convert QuickTime and MP4 files using RLE compression
• MPEG-2 Transport Multiplexer now supports UAV Datalink Minimum Metadata Set (MISB STD 0902.1)
• Improved the speed of KLV data extraction from MPEG-2 Transport files
• RTSP filter now supports HTTP Tunneling, which allows users to stream data from RTSP cameras on another network
• RTSP Source now supports μ-Law and a-Law audio (Cisco WVC210v camera)
• Added support for live and on-demand IIS Smooth Streaming
• LEAD Windows Media Reader now supports playback of Windows Media Streams whose format changes during streaming
• Embed metadata and scripts into Windows Media Stream
• Combine multiple audio streams with the new LEAD Audio Mixer Filter
• UDP Source now supports raw uncompressed streams conforming to RFC4175
• New utility for enabling and disabling the use of Media Foundation modules in Windows Media Player
• Added closed captioning support to the MPEG-2 Decoder
• Convert closed captioning information to readable formats such as SubRip (SRT) or Text
• Save the settings of the target format in the convert module
• Fast and efficient creation of ISO/MP4 files with new Fast Save option
• Extended maximum file size and time limit of ISO/MP4 files to over 4GB and 8 hours
• Improved the performance of the Dynamic Frame Rate Controller

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Multimedia Imaging Engine.

• New File Formats
  • JPEG-LS
  • JPEG-XR
  • JPM
  • VFF
• New Digital Camera Formats (DCF)
  • CR2 - Canon
  • NEF and NRW - Nikon
  • DNG - Adobe
  • ORF - Olympus
  • ARW, SR2, and SRF - Sony
  • RAW and RW2 - Panasonic
  • RAF - Fujifilm
• Enhancements to Existing File Formats
  • Support for loading OS/2 BMP 16-bit
  • Support for loading PNG 1+1
• Support for ARGB4 color conversion

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Imaging Engine.

• Added support for loading PCL6
• Optimized load performance of PCL and CGM formats
• CGM view options now support Virtual Device Coordinates (VDC)
• Added support for loading different DXF paper spaces
• Added Geometric text support for DXF
• Added CMYK RLE raster data support within PCL
• Added support in DWF filter to load according to sheet dimensions

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Vector Imaging Engine.