Software developers in document, medical and multimedia imaging are the target market for a new release of LEADTOOLS V17.5

“On top of our many enhancements to our document, medical and multimedia imaging engines, we really stepped outside of our traditional feature set with this release,” says Otis Goodwin, Manager of Developer Support. 

“We realize the growth cloud and grid computing has made over the last few years, and wanted to include a complete framework customers could use to move their applications to the cloud.  We have also added many features which allow us to natively interact with several document formats, specifically PDF, making V17.5 one of our biggest releases for the document imaging industry.”

The LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Engine incorporates a new Advanced PDF Reader, redesigned Barcode interface, faster and more accurate OCR Advantage Engine, network support for the Virtual Printer, and improvements to document formats including Office 2007 and JBIG2.

PDF reading and viewing now offers support for extraction of text, hyperlinks, bookmarks and metadata. 

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 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 can read all barcodes in an image with a single function call.  This interface also handles the complexities of the extensive collection of barcode symbologies LEADTOOLS supports.

The LEADTOOLS OCR Advantage Engine in 17.5 is faster and more accurate due to improvements in AutoZoning, table detection, image auto-preprocessing and spellchecking.  Additionally, the OCR Advantage Engine now supports 32 languages, including
Chinese, Japanese and Korean. 

LEAD has bundled OMR support and searchable PDF output capability into the OCR Advantage Engine.

A new LEADTOOLS Cloud SDK can be used for creating cloud-based, distributed computing applications with unlimited potential for speed and platform independence.

Utilising 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 a network of worker machines in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Medical Imaging Engine

Developers can now fully customise and localise the Medical Workstation and Web Viewer Frameworks, and take advantage of new MWL and MPPS components for the PACS Framework. 

The Medical Image Viewer has been given new image display options and functions, annotations and synchronization tools.  The Medical 3D engine now supports Curved MPR which can generate Paraxial cuts and Panoramic reconstructions.  In addition, the DICOM libraries support several new transfer syntaxes including JPEG-LS, and developers can use CCOW to easily integrate and synchronize information between multiple systems.

Multimedia Imaging Engine

LEAD has enhanced the Multimedia Imaging engine by expanding support for streaming technologies.  The Multimedia Imaging Engine now includes an MMS Filter for pushing Windows Media Content to a Windows Media Server, adding Script metadata/commands to
Windows Media, HTTP Tunneling within the RTSP filter, IIS Smooth Streaming, and support for UAV Datalink Minimum Metadata Set (MISB STD 0902.1).  Additionally, JPEG 2000 Codec users will experience dramatic speed improvements of up to 8x and developers using the .NET interface no longer need to register the DLLs, allowing for simplified deployment. 

Raster and Vector Imaging Engines

The Raster Engine now supports JPEG-LS, JPEG-XR, Digital Camera Formats (Sony, Canon, Nikon, etc.), PCL6 and more.  The Vector engine also received several enhancements to the DXF and DWF formats, staying up to date with the latest objects and drawing types.

More information on the new release is available HERE.

Australian distributor Microway