LEADTOOLS Recognition SDK

What's new in LEADTOOLS Document Engine V17.5

• 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 compatability 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 multi-threaded 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 pre-processing 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 Spellcheckingincluding 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

The LEADTOOLS Recognition SDK includes the following products:

• LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
• LEADTOOLS Document Imaging
• LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR Module
• LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition Module
• LEADTOOLS OMR Module
• LEADTOOLS PDF OCR Module
• LEADTOOLS 1D Barcode Module
• LEADTOOLS 2D Barcode Module

The provided recognition and processing engines 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 consisting of predefined fields for each known form. These fields can be defined using the Forms application included 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 and barcodes.

In addition to saving the recognized data in various structured output formats such as delimited text, XML or database fields, a recognized free form document can be converted to searchable PDF for enterprise data mining.

To further enhance the accuracy of the recognition process, the Recognition SDK includes the LEADTOOLS document image clean-up engine, a set of document image pre-processing tools for deskew and despeckle, as well as line, border and hole-punch removal.

For maximum performance, forms recognition and OCR high level interfaces utilize an intelligent multi-threaded algorithm during recognition and processing and are supported in both 32 and 64 bit development.

LEADTOOLS Recognition SDK Key Features:

• Provided as a low and high level .NET interface to create complete recognition and processing applications with very little code.
• Full source code for an end-user Forms Recognition and Processing application and hundreds of lines of sample source code ready for copy and paste.
• Use in conjunction with LEADTOOLS Workflow Foundation activities to incorporate scanning, OCR, ICR (hand-written text), OMR, MICR, PDF OCR, redaction and annotations.
• Designed for maximum performance and emphasize thread safety for enterprise service oriented application developments. LEADTOOLS is ready to be used in server based architectures such as WCF services and WF activities.
• Flexible automatic recognition engine can be customized to use Barcode, OCR, line detection, and special object detection such as logos, text blocks, and shapes.
• Load and save form identification information as XML for storage in a database.
• Handles any of 150+ input file formats with different bits-per-pixel, dpi, scales, skew angles, and noise.
• Define multi-page forms for recognition and processing.
• Stores any number of pre-defined forms.
• Recognizes forms at both form and page level to compare an image to any form page or compare a complete multi-page form to any predefined master form.
• Define, include, and exclude regions 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 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
• Auto-registration and clean-up to improve recognition results.
• Manual feature weighting to improve recognition performance.
• Generates comprehensive results and confidence level reports to assess performance.

Sandard Support (Free)
Standard technical support is provided free to all registered LEADTOOLS customers. In addition, LEAD offers free Standard technical support to prospective customers working with evaluation versions of their products. Free Standard technical support includes unlimited email communication and unlimited access to LEAD's online support portal including the community forums and Knowledge base.

Premium Support ($100 per case, $400 - 5 pack of cases )
In addition to free Standard technical support, LEAD offers Premium support on a per "case" basis. Premium support allows customers to contact LEAD's support representatives by telephone. Support representatives may be reached by phone Monday - Friday, 8:30 - 6:00 EST, excluding national holidays.

Annual Maintenance (Annual fee)
By purchasing a LEADTOOLS Annual Maintenance plan, you receive any and all development seat updates, enhancements and new versions released by LEAD during the period of maintenance. In addition to updates and upgrades, as an annual maintenance subscriber, you receive five (5) free Premium Support cases to use during the maintenance period. Finally, a maintenance subscriber is entitled to a 30% discount on additional Premium Support cases over and above the 5 free cases provided with a maintenance subscription.