Charlotte, NC (September 1, 2020) -

Thirty years ago, LEAD was founded by Moe Daher and Rich Little with the vision of helping developers build better applications by providing innovative technology through easy-to-use software development toolkits. Crossing over this significant milestone, LEAD continues to carry out that vision with the release of LEADTOOLS Version 21. This major version release is highlighted by new cutting-edge libraries and features, including an intelligent Document Analyzer that automatically searches, finds, and takes action on data-of-interest within any structured or unstructured form and an ICR engine capable of robust handwriting recognition. Additionally, numerous other LEADTOOLS libraries have received an impressive amount of enhancements and new features.

“Over the past three decades, the entire team at LEAD has worked diligently in perfecting computer vision development for our Recognition, Document, Medical, Multimedia, and Imaging technologies”, said Moe Daher, Chairman and CEO of LEAD Technologies. “With the release of LEADTOOLS Version 21, I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished and the powerful libraries that we’re making available to developers around the world.”

Recognition SDK

New Intelligent Document Analyzer SDK

The investments LEAD has been making in artificial intelligence and machine learning development are exemplified within the new Document Analyzer SDK. The Document Analyzer intelligently recognizes and acts on data from text-based office documents (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLX), PDFs, and document images (JPG, TIFF, PNG, PDF) without requiring a structured layout. The analyzer handles various data formats, including tables, text flows, and data across multiple lines. With predefined rulesets as well as the ability to add custom rulesets for user-specific data, the use cases for businesses and organizations are extensive.

New ICR Technology for Handwritten Print and Cursive Recognition

LEAD has been known as the leading provider of OCR technology for many years. With the release of Version 21, LEAD adds brand new ICR technology for remarkable unstructured handwritten print and cursive text recognition. With powerful automatic document and image pre-processing, LEADTOOLS ICR handles handwriting recognition even on noisy or low-resolution images. LEAD’s ICR raises the bar for what application developers can create by providing comprehensive reports of text results and full support for the English character set, including uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, and symbols.

New Automatic Mixed Zone Recognition for Complex Forms Processing

Recognizing that automation and efficiency are at the forefront for developers building document and form processing applications, LEAD has added new AutoZone capabilities to the Recognition SDK. This allows users to extract text from images that contain a mix of machine-printed text, handwritten text, MICR, MRZ, OMR, graphics, and table zones. LEADTOOLS will automatically detect, recognize, and extract everything. This powerful combination of recognition technologies is critical for companies that need to quickly and accurately process various form types regardless of how the data is formatted.

Document SDK

Significant PDF SDK Additions and Enhancements

The developers at LEAD have completely reworked how LEADTOOLS loads and renders PDF files in Version 21. This effort shows a marked improvement in memory usage, load time, and rendering. Version 21 has the ability to load any portion of a PDF document and the rendering quality is vastly improved, including smooth text zooming with no pixelation. This release also boasts support to load and process PDF Portfolio and PDF attachments, support for PDF text and image redaction, the "Enhance Thin Lines" rendering feature that clarifies thin lines in the viewer, as well as many more enhancements to our PDF libraries.

Key Document Framework Updates

The LEADTOOLS Document Framework is the core of many of LEAD’s offerings and has received a vast amount of updates and optimizations in Version 21. LEAD has added a new Document Viewer component for Xamarin Forms, the ability to load and play video with the Document Viewer, and numerous client-side rendering enhancements, including digital signature, memory optimization, and more. Support to load a mix of different annotation formats, including IBM P8/Deja annotations, and optimized hybrid caching also have been added to the toolkit. Additionally, LEADTOOLS Document and Image Compare functionality to compare two documents or pages and intelligently highlight changes, additions, and deletions has been added. Finally, support for all Office formats has received updates, such as enhanced vector graphic rendering, document decryption, speed and memory optimization, and much more.

Medical SDK

Medical Toolkit Additions and Enhancements

Version 21 brings major enhancements to the DICOM Storage Server including several new server add-ins such as DICOM Import, Export Layout, and AmazonS3 Cloud Storage. LEAD has also expanded existing forwarding capabilities and added DICOM Security to the Gateway, Patient Updater, Forwarder, and HL7 Patient Updater. Also with this release, the Medical Web Viewer provides optional temporary viewing access to images that are shared via URL, new Okta authentication and HL7 messaging can be used with both the Medical Web Viewer and the patient updater, and numerous DICOM and Medical Annotation updates have been added, including high-level functions to convert between LEAD and DICOM annotation objects.

Multimedia SDK

Added Multimedia Support

Within the Multimedia SDK, LEAD has added support for over ten new Media Foundation target formats, including MPEG-2 Transport, MPEG-2 Program, and FMPEG4, giving users more options to decode multimedia files. Additionally, developers gain optimized ISO format capture and conversion, a new live audio processor to detect and fill dropped audio samples, and support within the Streaming Server to use MPEG-2 Transport and DICOM as the source file.

There are many other features, updates, and enhancements packed into this major version release. For more details on all of LEADTOOLS Version 21 and to download a free, fully-functional evaluation SDK, please visit https://www.leadtools.com/corporate/new-in-v21.

About LEAD Technologies

With a rich history of more than 34 years, LEAD has established itself as the world's leading provider of software development toolkits. LEAD's flagship product, LEADTOOLS, provides programmers with a powerful set of libraries for Recognition, Document, Vector, Medical, Imaging, and Multimedia development. LEAD boasts a diverse customer base as well as a strong list of corporate partners including some of the largest and most influential organizations from around the globe. For more information, visit www.leadtools.com.