LEADTOOLS Getting Started with Multimedia
The LEADTOOLS product line includes stand-alone toolkits, add-on modules, and product bundles. They are specifically targeted for programmers developing medical, document imaging and recognition, multimedia, still-frame imaging, and vector imaging applications. A brief overview of the different products follows.
LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro provides Win32 and x64 support for adding to any application the capability to display, load, save, convert, or process images. The toolkit supports color conversion, display, and compression in high-performance formats such as JPEG, JPEG 2000 (J2K and JP2), TIFF, CCITT G4 and LEAD's proprietary CMP, CMW, and ABC.
With Imaging Pro, developers get support for all of the technologies found in the LEADTOOLS Imaging Engine, including image processing (transforms, filters, drawing, region of interest), TWAIN Scanning, color conversion, display, special effects, (choose from more than 2000 effects), compression, image format support (150+), printing, internet/intranet imaging, database imaging, imaging common dialogs, and screen capture.
In addition, LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro offers the ability to directly call exported DLL functions, create extremely small footprint applications, obtain low-level access to pixel data, create custom image processing filters, take full control of load/process/save with callbacks, share images (without copying) via DIBs/DDBs, customize all display options, and support the extended FlashPix file format capabilities.
Key Features:
File Format Support. Read, write and convert image files in over 150 of the most popular standard image formats, including JPEG, JPEG 2000 (J2K and JP2), GIF, TIFF (including G3/G4, LZW, CMYK, JTIF), PNG, BMP, MODCA/IOCA, PCX, TGA, and XPS. Read JPX files.
Image Processing. Use more than 200 digital filters and transforms to process images (or selected portions). You can deskew, smooth, sharpen, edge detect/enhance, modify brightness/contrast/gamma, change hue and saturation, red-eye removal, unsharp mask, add noise, and resize and rotate images using various resampling techniques (including bicubic). Over half of all image functions support both signed and unsigned images.
WPF. Windows Presentation Foundation is part of the .NET Framework 3.0. It handles interoperability with Win32, media services, databinding, and user aspects.
Image Compression. Compress images using the best and fastest compression algorithms, such as JPEG, CMP, CMW, ABC, LZW, G3/G4, Huffman, and run-length. LEADTOOLS offers comprehensive support for compression schemes found in standard raster file formats, as well as high-performance proprietary compression technologies that outperform the industry standards.
Image Display. Control brightness and contrast settings, color reduction with dithering and palette control, zooming/scaling/fitting, panning, scrolling, painting with transparency and/or regions. Additionally, LEADTOOLS toolkits provide image-list and thumbnail browser controls, a special magnifying-glass feature, as well as an automated pan-window control.
Image Optimizer. Optimize images for websites or applications by reducing colors and maximizing compression.
Color Conversion. Changing the color mode changes the amount of data stored per pixel, which alters an image's memory/disk requirements. Convert between color modes, like 24-bit true-color, 8-bit indexed, 1-bit black/white, and many others.
TWAIN Scanning. Control any scanner, digital camera or capture card that has a TWAIN (32 and 64 bit) device driver. High-level acquisition support is included for ease of use while low-level functionality is provided for flexibility and control in even the most demanding applications.
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA). Spans the full spectrum of digital imaging, including in-depth support for image acquisition from a wide variety of hardware devices.
Screen Capture. LEADTOOLS provides functions for capturing all or part of the screen. The result can then be used with any of the LEADTOOLS image processing functions and can be saved in any file format that LEAD supports.
Printing. Print images or selected regions while controlling position/scaling, halftoning/dithering. Print multiple images and text to a single or multiple pages.
Common Dialogs. Imaging Common Dialogs provide a set of common dialog boxes that combine Windows Common Dialog functionality with LEADTOOLS imaging functionality. Common dialogs are provided for every LEADTOOLS image processing function, plus FileOpen, FileSave, Color Resolution, Image Processing/Filtering, Effects and others. You can specify your own String and/or Text, as well as handle Language Customization - a great feature for globalizing your software.
Database Imaging. Store images (any supported file-format/compression-technique) to a variety of databases, including SQL, Oracle or any database which supports ODBC, OLE DB, or that can be bound via VB data control connections.
Internet/Intranet Imaging. LEADTOOLS internet support can be used to extend functionality on a server or via web browsers such as Internet Explorer.
Web Forms (AJAX LEADTOOLS AJAX support enables you to add fast, interactive image viewing to your web applications.
Digital Paint. A must for anyone who wants to add digital painting functionality to their application. With LEADTOOLS' Digital Paint feature, a developer can create an entire image editing or design application, or simply add pieces of those types of functionality into an existing application.
FlashPix extended support. LEADTOOLS FlashPix extended support provides increased versatility in the handling of color and grayscale images.
Barcode Modules. LEADTOOLS Barcode Module functions allow you to add the ability to read, write and find duplicate barcodes within an image. Barcode modules allow programmers to easily integrate the ability to read and write barcode symbols into their applications.
WinRT SDK. The LEADTOOLS WinRT SDK contains everything a developer needs to create imaging-enabled Windows Store applications.
Android SDK. The LEADTOOLS Android SDK contains everything a developer needs to create imaging-enabled Android applications.
iOS / OS X SDK. The LEADTOOLS iOS / OS X SDK contains everything a developer needs to create imaging-enabled iOS / OS X applications.
Linux SDK. The LEADTOOLS Linux SDK contains everything a developer needs to create imaging-enabled Linux applications
Building on LEADTOOLS core Raster Imaging functions, LEADTOOLS Document Imaging and LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging are the most comprehensive imaging toolkits on the market. [Document/Medical] is used throughout the help files to designate those features that are available in all of these premium SDKs.
These toolkits are LEAD's flagship products and are designed for the programmer who is looking for the fastest performance and most extensive color, document, and medical imaging capabilities available. No other toolkits provide as many imaging features for color, grayscale and black-and-white images in one development package, or for one price.
These toolkits contain powerful annotation capabilities, optimized document image processing filters, and high performance compression, decompression and viewing of ABIC, CMW wavelet, JBIG/JBIG2, JPEG, JPX (read/write), JPIP, LEAD CMP, LEAD ABC (bitonal), and CCITT G3/G4 file formats. These LEADTOOLS toolkits offer the fastest software-only JPEG decoder available.
Annotation capabilities enable the programmer to add text, highlights, sticky notes, audio, ellipses, buttons, lines, arrows, rectangles, polygons, redaction (blackout), hotspots, freehand scribble, pointers, bitmap and text stamps to black-and-white and color images. Programmers working with document imaging will also find special processing filters such as despeckle, deskew, favor black, and scale to gray to enhance their black and white 1-bit images. Additionally, you can achieve faster rotation in 90-degree increments by applying a rotated view perspective to the bitmap.
The Leadtools.Controls namespace contains an image viewer control for displaying images in HTML5 applications. Several annotations namespaces provide full-featured support for annotations in HTML5 applications.
LEADTOOLS NITF functions enable you to manipulate National Imagery Transmission Format files in your Windows applications.
The LEADTOOLS Document Imaging toolkit contains all the features available in LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro, plus the following capabilities:
Annotation, JavaScript Annotation and WPF Annotation. LEADTOOLS supports annotation of images by letting you overlay images with text, lines, shapes, arrows, buttons, highlights, hot spots, sticky notes, stamps, buttons, and sounds.
Bitonal Scaling (Image Enhancement) for black-and-white images. LEADTOOLS functions for bitonal images greatly enhance their on-screen quality and readability. These functions are especially useful for working with images from black-and-white scanners or FAX machines.
Document Cleanup (Image Enhancement) for bitonal images. Other LEADTOOLS functions for bitonal images (especially useful for working with images from black-and-white scanners or FAX machines) let you do things such as automatically straighten (deskew) an image (including proprietary functions for deskewing scanned bank checks), remove spots (despeckle), or clarify a scaled display (using scale-to-gray and favor-black features). Document toolkits also include support for removing dots, blobs, holes (hole punch marks), inverted text, lines, borders, bumps and nicks from 1-bit images.
Fast rotation. LEADTOOLS achieves fast rotation in 90-degree increments by applying a rotated view perspective to the bitmap.
FAST TWAIN. Control image acquisition from any device (scanner, digital camera, etc) that supports TWAIN. Use a device's built in user-interface or create your own. Analyze the TWAIN source, considering the bits per pixel, image type and compression requested from the TWAIN device, and find the fastest compression type, transfer mode and buffer schemes to get the best performance possible.
Silverlight image viewer controls for panning, zooming, scrolling, and more. Silverlight image file format codecs for extending the image file format load / save capabilities of Silverlight. Over 130 image processing filters, transforms, and pixel shader effects.
HTML5/JavaScript image viewer control for displaying images in an HTML5 page across different platforms. Supports mouse and multi-touch (gesture) input. Interactive modes for panning, zooming, pinch and zoom, and more.
ABIC. Read and write ABIC compressed files (used for compressing bank check images).
>JBIG.LEAD includes support for this filter in the LEADTOOLS Document and Medical Imaging toolkits. JBIG defines a method for lossless compression encoding of a bi-level image (two-color image). This method can also be used for coding grayscale and color images. LEADTOOLS completely supports all three types of images, giving you the ability to make full use of this powerful compression technology. LEADTOOLS also supports the progressive capability of JBIG, allowing you to store and send multiple representations of images at different resolutions without any extra storage overhead.
MRC. LEADTOOLS supports the Mixed Raster Content format for color documents containing mixed image and text components.
Raster PDF Save. Support for saving raster images as a PDF file. This includes the MRC PDF save and compression features.
WCF Services that support file conversion, image processing, document cleanup, barcode, and OCR.
Windows Workflow Components components that support file conversion, image processing, document cleanup, barcode, OCR, and high speed scanning.
CD/DVD Burning.
JPIP (JPEG2000 Interactive Protocol). High-level components that developers can easily plug into enterprise client/server applications, allowing them to immediately start streaming high-resolution images under low HTTP bandwidth connections.
LEAD ABC (bitonal). Read and write LEAD ABC bitonal compressed.
NITF Support. LEADTOOLS NITF functions enable you to manipulate the National Imagery Transmission Format in your Windows applications.
Embedded Messages. The Document toolkits include support for embedding messages in lossless image formats like bmp, tiff, lossless jpeg, etc. The message is embedded without any visible changes to the image, and does not appreciably increase the size of the image. The message is password-protected.
Barcode Modules. LEADTOOLS Barcode Module functions allow you to add the ability to read barcodes, write barcodes and find duplicate barcodes within an image. Barcode modules allow programmers to easily integrate the ability to read and write barcode symbols into their applications.
Cloud. LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK provides developers with a complete framework which can be used to create powerful cloud-based applications. Utilizing a network of servers and worker machines, developers can easily create any kind of distributed, grid or parallel computing application.
LEADTOOLS Document Imaging modules and plug-ins build on the capabilities of LEADTOOLS Document Imaging, adding automated Forms Recognition, Barcode Imaging, OCR / MICR, ICR, OMR, PDF OCR, and Advanced PDF, and Raster PDF Read and Write support to document imaging applications.
LEADTOOLS Recognition SDK is a handpicked collection of modules including Advantage OCR, OMR, PDFOCR, 1D and 2D Barcode. It is designed to help systems developers build end-to-end document applications for capturing, classification, forms processing, archiving and viewing as part of an enterprise level document automation solution.
The provided Recognition and Processing engines allow developers to fully automate document classification and data extraction for known forms. The Recognition engine creates unique XML data for each known form which is used to identify any form requiring recognition. The Processing engine uses templates, allowing users to define a specific set of fields (along with each fields type) for each known form. These fields can be defined using the Master Forms Editor shipped with the SDK, or developers can create their own template editor using the toolkit. Supported field types include machine and hand written characters, check boxes, filled bubbles, cross marks, barcodes, and more.
Key Features:
Forms Recognition Engine provided as a low and high level .NET interface allowing you to create complete recognition and processing applications with very little code.
Full source code for an end-user Forms Recognition and Processing application + hundreds of lines of sample source code.
Use in conjunction with LEADTOOLS Document Imaging workflow functions to incorporate scanning, OCR (Advantage engine is included, other engines are available), ICR (hand-written text), OMR (to extract check marks, check boxes, etc), PDF OCR, MICR, redaction, and annotations with recognition and processing.
Flexible automatic recognition engine can be customized to use Barcode, OCR, line detection, and special object detection (such as logos, text blocks, and shapes).
Loads/saves form identification information as XML for storage in a database.
Handles any of 150+ input file formats, including different bits-per-pixel, dpi, scales, skew angles, and noise.
Lets you define multi-page forms for recognition and processing.
Stores any number of pre-defined forms.
Recognizes forms at both form and page level, so you can compare an image to any form page or compare a complete multi-page form to any predefined master form.
Recognizes any number of regions or objects on a page.
Lets you define, include, and exclude regions of interest in the form.
Supports a variety of data fields such as: text, OMR, image, and Barcode
Text fields support both printed and hand-written text.
Supports regular expressions to find / validate text in a specified format.
Image fields allow you to extract signatures, personal pictures, logos, and fingerprints.
Barcode fields support all barcode Linear(1D) and 2D types, such as PDF417, DataMatrix, QR, EAN, UPC, Databar, and 4-state.
Handles different form fields either by name or GUID
Enables auto-registration (deskew) and clean-up to improve recognition results.
Enables manual feature weighting for improved recognition performance.
Generates comprehensive results and confidence level reports to assess performance.
The LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite SDK includes all of the functionality in LEADTOOLS Recognition, and adds extra features resulting in a single toolkit with everything necessary to build enterprise level document imaging applications.
Key Features:
Complete raster PDF support, both read and write.
Capture printed output from any application as EMF using LEADTOOLS Virtual Printer Module. Captured EMF files can be converted to any supported document format using LEADTOOLS Document Writers.
Network Printing. The LEADTOOLS Virtual Printer supports Network Printing. With this feature, users can install a network printer on a server machine, and print to it from any client machine, Users can customize the printing process on the server and the client. The whole printing process is fully customizable. Users can pass back and forth any raw data from the server side to the client side.
Convert EMF files to document files including PDF, PDF/A, Word Doc, HTML, RTF and TXT.
Forms Recognition and Processing, both high and low level interfaces.
Read and Write support for all LEADTOOLS supported Barcode (.NET, C DLL, and C++ Class Library) types (1D and 2D).
Document clean-up functionality.
Advanced PDF. With the LEADTOOLS Advanced PDF Module, you can add the ability to extract text, hyperlinks, internal links and bookmarks; Merge PDF files; Extract / delete pages; Convert to PDF/A; Linearize, encrypt and decrypt PDF files; Add, replace and delete pages; Write PDF bookmarks; Convert Postscript files to PDF.
To all the capabilities of the LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro and Document Imaging toolkits, LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging adds support for medical imaging technologies and the DICOM file format, supporting 1- through 16-, 24-, and 32-bit color, 1- through 16-bit grayscale, and window leveling of 12- and 16-bit grayscale images. Features available only in Medical toolkits indicated by [Medical], are:
12 and 16 bit grayscale images. Load, process, display, window level and save 12 and 16 bit grayscale images (including support for 16-bit grayscale TIFF).
DICOM file support. LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging provides complete support for the DICOM 3.0 specification, including all standard IOD classes and modalities (CR, CT, MR, NM, US, RF, SC, VL, etc.) and complete DICOM Basic Directory support.
Window leveling. Detect and set LowBit and HighBit for image data, display images with automatic LUT intensity expansion, or set LUT entries and ranges with specific values and gradients. Display images through the LUT without changing the data, or process the image data using the LUT. Linearize the number of pixels locally in a bitmap, based on the specified color space in order to bring out the detail in dark areas of an image, and smooth the edges between blocks.
Medical Imaging Processing. LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging provides image processing functionality designed specifically to allow you to examine and improve the quality of medical images.
Medical Image Viewer Control. LEADTOOLS Medical Image Viewer Control provides support for displaying one or more images and for the real-time manipulation of one or more images.
LEADTOOLS PACS Imaging provides you with everything you need to create both client and server components of a picture archive and retrieval system (PACS) that can retrieve, distribute, and present medical images. The module includes full support for medical data communications, automated processing, and all DICOM client/server classes, command sets, and command elements including:
DICOM Communication support. LEADTOOLS provides complete support for DICOM Communications, including all Service Classes (Verification, Storage, Query/Retrieve, Patient Management, etc), and contains high-level communications functions simplifying the creation of DICOM client/server applications.
LEADTOOLS Web Viewer Framework, a web-based framework based on WCF for distributing medical studies from server to client.
HTML5 / JavaScript Medical Web Viewer for cross-platform support for implementing client-side window leveling and image processing.
Support for all storage IOD classes and service classes defined in the DICOM version 3 2008 base standard.
PACS Framework.The PACS Framework is a framework for easily creating DICOM-based servers. The framework consists of a Windows Service (Leadtools.Dicom.Service.exe) that implements a user-defined DICOM service.
DICOM Security. LEADTOOLS DICOM Security features support the Secure Transport Connection Profiles as specified in part 15 of the DICOM 3 standard.
Medical Multimedia Filter Module. The LEADTOOLS Medical Multimedia Filter Module is a suite of DirectShow filters for compressing and decompressing video and audio data inside DICOM files.
Develop powerful PACS and Medical imaging applications with LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Suite. Features include Medical Web Viewer Framework, Medical 3D, Medical Multimedia, high and low level PACS SCP and SCU functions and controls, DICOM PACS communication security, comprehensive full DICOM dataset support, 8-16 bit extended grayscale image support, image annotation, specialized extended grayscale image display such as window level and LUT processing, and specialized medical image processing. Other features include lossless JPEG compression, JPIP, and signed and unsigned image data processing.
LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging modules and plug-ins enable you to add:
Medical Multimedia Filter Module. The LEADTOOLS Medical Multimedia Filter Module is a suite of DirectShow filters for compressing and decompressing video and audio data inside DICOM files.
Medical 3D Module. LEADTOOLS Medical 3D SDK technology provides capabilities to construct and view a 3-dimensional volume from a set of homogenous 2-dimensional medical images.
Create professional, high-quality multimedia applications encompassing everything from file conversion to video conferencing and streaming. The LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK allows developers to add support for Capture, Play, Edit, conversion to and from many formats including AVI, MPEG-2 Program/Transport, MPEG-1, ISO (MP4, 3GPP, AAC, AVC1, MOV), XVID, WMV , WAV, WMA, OGG, and more. Also provided is the most comprehensive set of DirectShow and Media Foundation filters which can be used for almost any multimedia processing task. The provided high level interface allows for programmatic control over multimedia processors, compressors, video and audio inputs, types and sub-types, video capture size, camera specific features (brightness, contrast, zoom, etc).
LEADTOOLS Multimedia includes:
Multimedia Capture
Create applications that can capture from WDM, native DirectShow including DV, and Video for Windows capture devices
Multimedia Playback
Create applications that can play all formats supported by DirectShow, including DVDs and TV tuners
Multimedia Conversion
Add features to your application so your users can convert to and from AVI, MPEG-2 Program/Transport, MPEG-1, ISO (MP4, 3GPP, AAC, AVC1, MOV), XVID, WMV , WAV, WMA, OGG, and many more.
Still Image Compression
Add support to your application for compressing individual samples with any available DirectShow filters (Memory to memory).
Multimedia Processing
Add to your applications the ability to process video and audio data from disk, memory, video devices, or streaming servers using the extensive set of provided DirectShow and Media Foundation filters.
The LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDK includes full or evaluation versions* of many DirectShow and Media Foundation filters such as encoders, decoders, multiplexers, demultiplexers, sources, and sinks. Also included are evaluation versions [*] of the DVD writer, DVD burner, MPEG-1 multiplexer, MPEG-2 multiplexer, ISO multiplexer/demultiplexer, Screen capture filter, Network filters (source, mux, sink and protocol manager) (TCP/IP, UDP, RTSP), DICOM medical toolkit filters and more.
Refer to LEADTOOLS DirectShow Filters and LEADTOOLS Media Foundation Filters for a complete listing of available filters. Refer to the Multimedia Product Comparison Chart to see which licensed filters are included with the various LEADTOOLS products. LEADTOOLS Multimedia includes evaluation versions of all DirectShow and Media Foundation filters for use in development and testing.
[*] For pricing on filter and codec client licenses, contact sales@LEADTOOLS.com.
Includes the LEADTOOLS Multimedia toolkit,every LEAD codec and filter (except the DICOM filters), the LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro toolkit, the LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK, and the following Multimedia add-ons:
LEADTOOLS Video Streaming Module
LEADTOOLS MPEG-2 Transport Module
LEADTOOLS Multimedia Modules enable you to add:
DVD support. Full functionality for programmatically burning, converting, playing and creating DVD images including the LEAD MPEG-2 Video Codec (Encoder/Decoder) and several DirectShow filters.
DVR support. Pause, rewind and fast-forward live streams.
Video Streaming support. The LEADTOOLS Video Streaming Module is perfect for developers who need to serve Videos on Demand or create Video Conferencing applications.
Medical Multimedia support. Provides a suite of DirectShow filters for compressing and decompressing video and audio data inside DICOM files.
MPEG2 Transport support. The LEADTOOLS MPEG-2 Transport Module includes DirectShow filters to create and play MPEG-2 Transport and MPEG-2 Program streams.
The LEADTOOLS Vector Imaging Pro toolkit includes everything you need to create powerful 2-D and 3-D viewers, editors, and converters that support both vector and raster image formats.
LEADTOOLS Vector Imaging Pro provides support for 2D and 3D Vector formats, including: imaging, loading, viewing, modifying and saving vector files to memory or disk. Vector files can be loaded from one format and saved as another, without the need for the original application that created the file. Vector image formats can be loaded, saved, converted and exported to any of 120+ raster formats.
Primitive Object support includes: Arc, Bitmap, Brush, Camera, Circle, Clone, Ellipse, Elliptical Arc, Font, Group, Layer, Line, Pen, Pie, Chord, Poly Draw, Polygon, Poly Line, and Poly Bezier.
For information about all LEAD products, visit www.leadtools.com.
For more information, refer to:
Unlocking Special LEAD Features
LEADTOOLS Product Comparison Chart
LEADTOOLS Multimedia Product Comparison Chart
LEADTOOLS OCR Modules Comparison Chart
See Also:
