LEADTOOLS Document Imaging includes everything in Imaging Pro and adds Document Imaging functionality: Annotations, bitonal document clean-up, image processing, bitonal display filters and enhanced performance, Mixed Raster Content and JBIG, JBIG2 and ABIC compression, and high-speed twain scanning. Add on comprehensive OCR support.

Develop powerful document imaging applications with LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDK. Features include comprehensive annotations (Text, highlights, sticky notes, stamps, and more), and specialized bitonal image display and processing such as scale-to-gray and favor-black. Other features include performance and memory optimizations for bitonal images, document image clean-up including hole-punch, line removal and scanning with Fast TWAIN.

Key Features:

• WPF Standard .NET
• WPF Pro
• Annotations
• General Imaging Features
• Display, Memory and Processing Optimizations (Bitonal Scaling)
• Specialized Storage and Compression (MRC, JBIG, JBIG2, ABIC, CMW)
• Image Acquisition - Fast TWAIN
• Document Cleanup (Image Enhancement Functionality)
• ePrint Integration
• Unicode and ANSI Support

Additional features can be added to Document Imaging:

• New Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• New Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)
• New Optical Mark Recognition (OMR)
• New Forms Recognition
• New Forms Processing
• OCR PDF Plug-in
• Raster PDF Plug-ins
• New JPIP Client and Server
• Barcodes

NEW Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Standard .NET
WPF supports robust imaging capabilities, interface automation, data-driven user interfaces and visualization, as well as Windows shell integration. WPF can natively access Windows Imaging Component (WIC) codecs and APIs, allowing developers to write image codecs for their specific image file formats.

The LEADTOOLS WPF Standard Edition includes controls for everything you need to start adding imaging functions to your Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications.

WPF Standard .NET Features:

• WPF BitmapSource Viewer - Supports all Microsoft .NET BitmapSource image objects. Includes Display, Scroll, Zoom, Margin, Frame, Shadow, PanWindow, and customizable MagGlass options. Provides interactive UI Tools like ZoomTo, Pan, CenterAt, and Scale.
• ImageList Control - Lets you display lists of thumbnail images in multiple View Styles like Explorer, Normal, Button, and User-defined. Allows you to set Image List Item Size, Selection Style, and scroll style.
• WPF Bitmap Effects - Use 130+ image processing effects and functions to add visual interest to WPF content.
• Windows Imaging Component (WIC) Codecs - Instantly add support for 40+ file formats to any WIC/WPF application, including the Windows XP SP3 Explorer and Vista Photo Explorer.

NEW Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Pro
Use the LEADTOOLS WPF Pro to unleash the power of LEADTOOLS in your XAML applications. Using LEAD's WPF interface, you can add LEADTOOLS OCR, TWAIN scanning, document pre-processing, medical imaging, and much more to any WPF application. Get Expression Blend-compatible and fully styleable controls for complete interoperation support between LEADTOOLS and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) images.

Key Features:
LEAD Technologies' most advanced WPF Image Viewer - Leadtools.Windows.Controls.Pro incudes image viewer controls that not only support all Microsoft .NET BitmapSource image objects, but works directly with LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro .NET classes, allowing you to leverage the full power of LEADTOOLS file format and image processing support. The fully styleable control includes scroll, zoom, pan, magnify glass, and image list.
Advanced WPF Image Processing - The Leadtools.Windows.Media namespace contains classes that let you convert a LEADTOOLS image (Leadtools.RasterImage) to and from a WPF image (System.Windows.Media.ImageSource). This namespace also gives you access to all LEADTOOLS image processing functions, allowing you to create powerful imaging applications using the WPF framework.

Benefits include:

• The most support for File Formats - Support even more file formats and flavors, as well as file metadata. Extend WPF file format support with LEAD's WIC-enabled codecs to load and save many image formats including PDF, TIFF, lossless and lossy JPEG, JPEG2000, JBIG2, PSD, DICOM and many more. Includes low-level control when loading and/or saving image files.
• Our most advanced Image Processing - Use over 130 Image Processing Effects including edge, blur, noise, artistic, texture, spatial, color adjustments and 3D. Low and High level image processing routines for document, medical, color adjustment, region processing, image analysis and statistics.

WPF Annotations
The Leadtools.Windows.Annotations namespace included with LEADTOOLS Document and Medical products adds powerful annotation capabilities to documents and images in WPF. These include not only lines, shapes, and pointers, but essential tools like redaction (blackout), hotspots, text, images, highlights, sticky notes, images, stamps and hyperlinks.

WPF Transition Effects
The Leadtools.Windows.Media.Transitions namespace allows you to add multiple slide show transition effects to your WPF projects. Choose from 10+ basic effects like wipe, blinds, push, rotate, and zoom, plus dozens of variants.

Annotations
LEADTOOLS offers a variety of annotation (document mark-up) objects that can be added to document, grayscale and color images in a presentation layer. With LEADTOOLS the end-user can draw, reposition and change the attributes (color, size, etc.) of any of the 30+ built-in objects types. From simple objects such as lines and rectangles to an enhanced redaction object that can restore parts of an image that were blacked out. When combined with annotation security, the redaction objects provide a means of granting user-level access to parts of an image. To provide a superior means of security and privacy, LEADTOOLS has an Encrypt/Decrypt object to encode an area of the image without introducing any new colors, thereby maintaining higher quality with lossy compressions.

Annotation objects can be stored as a separate object presentation layer, or can be burned or embedded into the actual image. LEADTOOLS allows you to read or write annotations as an external XML file or as LEAD, DICOM or Wang annotation tags within a TIFF file. Also, you can export the annotations objects to a standard Windows metafile. With the LEADTOOLS SDK, you can choose between low level access to the annotations, or you can implement annotation support through a fully automated user interface presentation mode with a ready to use customizable toolbar, pop-up menus and property dialogs. The annotation features provided in LEADTOOLS can be used in any application where image markup is required.

Key Features: (* Only available in .NET classes. ** Not available in .NET classes.)

• Create any of the following objects: RTF, Text Pointer, PolyRuler, Hot Spot, Rubber Stamps, Text, Button, Note, and more.
• Object oriented class hierarchy that lets you easily customize any built-in object or create your own from scratch.*
• 100% support for standard .NET serialization.*
• Save annotations in XML format.
• Alpha background fill option.
• Flicker free double buffered support. Annotation objects can be fixed in the container.**
• Ruler annotation can be easily and automatically calibrated.
• Tick marks for the Ruler, PolyRuler, Cross-Product and Protractor objects.
• Implement automated annotation support.
• Implement annotation passwords (case-sensitive) providing security for every object.
• Implement hyperlinks for every object. Hyperlinks can be user defined messages, programs to run, or jumps to Web pages.
• Custom cursor support for Annotation Automation object.
• Modify text strings used in automated annotation support.
• Scale and position a group to fit the displayed bitmap.
• Group and ungroup objects. Apply an object or group to a bitmap.
• Print an object or group. Size and position an object or group.
• Rotate, flip, reverse, or shear an object or group. Rotate WMF/EMF Stamp objects.
• Save annotations as an external LEAD file, WMF file, or as a WANG compatible tag inside a TIFF file.
• Save an object or group in a file, on the Windows clipboard, as a file in memory (this is useful for database support), or in a database using OLEDB or VB data binding. **
• Text object can import and export to and from a file. ** Text object supports tokens (date, time, username, etc..) **
• Control over where optional annotation name or title is displayed.
• Multi-page annotation support.
• Mask areas of an image with encryption.
• All processes and changes to annotation objects fire an event message.
• Horizontal alignment property for text objects. UserData property for all objects that is loaded and saved with the annotation object.
• Customizable object handles allow you to change the user interface of LEAD predefined objects, as well as create your own new annotation objects.

General Imaging Features:
Making the LEADTOOLS Document Imaging product line the most diverse and robust document imaging product available, LEAD has also included general (bitonal, grayscale and color) imaging features including Image Processing, Color Conversion, Display, Special Effects (choose from more than 2000 effects), Compression, Image Format (import/export), Printing, Internet/intranet imaging (Web Forms), Database imaging, Imaging Common Dialogs and Screen Capture.

Image Display, Memory and Processing Optimizations (Bitonal Scaling): (*Only available in LEADTOOLS Document Imaging or Medical Imaging Toolkits. †Only available in LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Toolkits.)
LEAD Technologies continually reviews and adds file format support to give your application control over the display of almost any Raster or Vector image (only available in LEADTOOLS Vector Imaging SDK) you encounter. LEADTOOLS currently supports over 150 different image formats and sub formats, each of which has its own unique set of load/save/display options, which may encompass varying types and/or degrees of compression, a range of image information bit-depths, progressive (multi-pass) image display, the ability to maintain multi-page or multi-channel images, animations, or non-image data, just to name a few. You can depend on LEAD Technologies to provide you with the support you need to give your application control over the display of almost any image you encounter. Image display can be subdivided into two groups: raster image display and vector image display. These groups are described in more detail in the following sections.

Raster Image Display
LEADTOOLS provides numerous functions to let you take control of your application's image display. Control brightness and contrast settings, color reduction with dithering and palette control, scaling/fitting, enlargement/reduction, panning, scrolling, painting with transparency and/or regions.

Further, LEADTOOLS provides high level image-list and thumbnail browser controls, a special magnifying-glass feature, an automated pan-window control, and a Zoom View control that allows you to annoate pre-defined zoomed regions.

Key Features

• Intensity, contrast and gamma correction - LEADTOOLS renders an image of any color depth (1 to 64 bit † ) to any display device, automatically handling any color reduction or expansion. Changes can be applied to the display without affecting the original data. If desired, color reduction and display settings can be rendered into the image (See Image Processing). You can render images with a color specified as transparent.
• Dithering - Images can be automatically dithered to match the output display device on the fly, without changing the image in memory. Specify the dithering method for images that have more bits per pixel than the current video mode. The following are options can enhance the quality of your image display:
  • Normal dithering (using error diffusion).
  • Ordered dithering, faster but less accurate than normal.
  • [DLL only] No dithering, which relies on the display device for color reduction.
• Position and Scale - Position the displayed image, and zoom in or out (enlarge or reduce) by scaling and clipping. Use nearest neighbor (fastest), bilinear (fast-good quality) or bicubic (best quality) resampling for enlarged/reduced display size. Specify a source rectangle (portion of source image to paint) and destination rectangle (position on screen or drawing surface on which to paint it) for complete control over image zoom and position. Or, specify higher level properties like ZoomFactor (fit-to-window preserving aspect ratio, stretch to entire window, fit-to-width, 1:1 normal display).
• Display Enhancement - Using our Document and Medical toolkits, when displaying 1-bit (black-and-white) images, to enhance the quality of display you can:
  • Specify a scale-to-gray option *, which increases the clarity of the 1-bit images when they are scaled (zoomed out).
  • Specify a favor-black option *, which prevents loss of details, such as fine lines, when an image is scaled down (zoomed out).
  • The rotated display feature allows rendering images rotated in 90-degree increments without changing the image in memory. Large 1-bit images can remain compressed in memory while decompressing only the portion needed for display*.
• Automated Controls - When working with the ActiveX, COM, or .NET controls, you can set properties which determine the way that images are displayed in the control, such as AutoScroll (automated scroll bars), AutoSize (snap control to image), PaintSizeMode (1:1 scale, fit image to control, zoomed at specified magnification factors).

When used with the AutoScroll option, all Scroll Bar activity is automatic (scroll bars respond to programmatic changes of display settings, and display settings are updated by user's use of scroll bars).

• Palette Control - If the display mode is 256 colors or less, you can use a palette already associated with the image, or use a fixed palette to eliminate palette (color) shifting when displaying more than one image at a time.
• Image List and Thumbnail Browser Controls - Display and manipulate a list of images as an array of thumbnails using the ImageList Control, or use the Thumbnail Browser for browsing entire directories of image files.
• Pan Window - The automated pan window enables navigation through a large image using a small thumbnail view.
• Zoom View - Our Document and Medical toolkits include a Zoom View control that allows you to display and/or annotate multiple pre-defined zoomed regions.
• Regions of Interest - Display an automated rubberband (rectangle, ellipse or freehand) to mark an area and create a region of interest.
  • Paint an image only in a selected region of interest, or paint an image with transparency (any pixels which are the selected transparent color are not painted).
  • Zoom in on a selected area. Use with automated rubberbanding for entirely automated behavior, or specify selected area in code.
• Drawing - Define the client area of a LEAD control as a display surface where you can use Windows graphics device interface (GDI) functions for drawing or adding text. (You can also get a display surface derived from the actual image stored in memory in order to use Windows GDI to draw permanently into the image - see Image Processing: Drawing.
• Apply Effects - Apply any of over 2000 Special Effects, such as wipes, fades, dissolves, transitions commonly used in slide presentations.
• Complete Control - When painting images on any video device, you can:
  • Selectively force repainting of the image in a LEAD control to avoid unnecessary repaints, or use AutoRepainting to automate all display updates.
  • Limit the area to be painted by specifying the source and destination clipping areas (independent of source and destination rectangles which position image on screen).
  • Use Double Buffer painting to eliminate flicker when painting.
  • se a buffer as the source to paint. (Can be used, for example, to paint an image as it is being loaded)
  • Specify an option for fast painting (without device error checking).
  • Apply ROP codes, which determine how to interact with the existing image on the screen. (not supported in .NET).

Vector Image Display: (Only available in LEADTOOLS Vector Imaging SDK)
The LEADTOOLS Vector Image Display features provide support for 2D and 3D Vector formats. Support for primitive objects include Arc, Bitmap, Brush, Camera, Circle, Clone, Ellipse, Elliptical Arc, Font, Group, Layer, Line, Pen, Pie, Chord, Poly Draw, Polygon, Poly Line, Poly Bezier, Raster, Rectangle, Text, Vertex and Clipping objects. Vector images can also be rotated, scaled and translated as a whole (not individual objects) for display purposes. In addition there are low and high-level functions to control the view of vector drawings include zooming (both uniform or around any axis), panning, rotation (around any axis) and anti-aliasing. Vector drawings can be scaled to any resolution desired without distorting the original image, ensuring that fine details of the drawing will not be lost during printing.

Specialized Storage and Compression:
Includes JBIG2, ABIC, JPEG2000 and LEAD CMW.

• Mixed Raster Content (MRC) uses a technique of dividing images into image and text components and then uses a compression suited for that type of image to get the best compression and quality possible
• JBIG is a bitonal image compression that uses several advanced techniques to compress bitonal images with no loss and consistently maintains much better compression ratios as compared to CCITT compression techniques
• JBIG2 is superior to LZW, TIFF Group 4 and other 1 bit compression
• ABIC is a compression format for compressing check images
• CMW is an advanced compression that is better than JPEG2000 in quality, speed and compression ratios. LEADTOOLS CMW includes support for multiple resolutions. This makes your applications faster and more memory efficient because the entire file does not have to be loaded and decompressed just to load a low resolution image
• LEADTOOLS ABC is LEAD's new LOSSLESS black and white image compression

Image Acquisition - Fast TWAIN - Scanners, Digital Cameras, Capture Cards
LEADTOOLS provides a powerful set of tools spanning the full spectrum of digital imaging, including in-depth support for image acquisition through industry standard interfaces from a wide variety of hardware devices.

With LEADTOOLS you can control any scanner, digital camera or capture card that has a TWAIN or WIA (32 or 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.

Using LEADTOOLS Scanning capabilities, your application can:

• Use the default user interface included with the TWAIN driver.
• Create your own user interface to the driver interface to expose only the functionality you want to expose.
• Negotiate the TWAIN File System used for digital cameras.
• Bypass the interface entirely for completely automated tasks or batch scanning.
• Control the type of image as supported by the device which is acquired (black & white, b/w with halftone, grayscale, color, etc...).
• Control the resolution (dpi), position, size, and orientation of the image to be acquired.
• Use the automated document feeder for single and multi-page scans, including support for duplex scanning.
• Use supplied events and callbacks to code your own special per-page processing.
• Selection dialog to select a TWAIN source or select a TWAIN source in code.
• Use of native, buffered memory or file transfer modes when acquiring from a TWAIN device.
• Flexibility to get and set all TWAIN v1.9 capabilities that the device's TWAIN driver supports.
• Save of the device's TWAIN capability settings to a template file, helping to save multiple settings of sources and load them as needed.
• Buffered memory transfer mode includes compression support. The scan data can be compressed using JPEG, RLE, BITFIELDS, GROUP 3, GROUP 4 or PACKBITS to reduce the data transfer bottle neck.
• Automatic selection of optimal device settings for speed. See LEADTOOLS Fast Twain for more information.
• Save buffered memory transfer data directly to a file.
• Get the Extended Image Info that some TWAIN scanner driver supports. For example, if the scanner driver supports reading barcodes or patch codes, then that information could be retrieved via LEADTOOLS TWAIN support.

With the LEADTOOLS TWAIN support, you can do anything that your TWAIN v1.9 driver supports. If your TWAIN driver is not v1.9 or does not support a functionality listed above, then LEADTOOLS will support all of the features that the driver has that are compatible with the TWAIN v1.9 specification.

LEADTOOLS TWAIN support gives your applications access to the wide variety of devices which can acquire images via TWAIN from manufacturers such as Kodak, Hewlett Packard, Microtek, Logitech, Canon and Fujitsu.

Document Cleanup:
Scanned documents often contain undesired elements, such as specks, dots, black borders, lines, and hole-punch marks.

LEADTOOLS provides powerful functions that can clean up documents by detecting and removing these elements. This class of LEAD functions each supply a "hook" into the API decision making process, allowing the programmer to obtain information about every detected element, and to use the information to tailor the function to meet his needs. Each function can also optionally return a region corresponding to any proposed changes, allowing for end-user "preview" capabilities.

These new features, along with the deskew, dilation, erosion, min and max filters give LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDK the power and flexibility you need when working with scanned documents.

The document clean-up functionality includes:

• Deskew - Automatically rotates an image to straighten it by using elements in the image to determine the skew angle. This function typically is used to automatically straighten scanned images
• Deskew Check - Similar to the normal deskew, but uses elements specific to check images to determine the skew angle. Useful for correcting alignment errors during automated check scanning
• Blank Page Detect - Determines whether the scanned image is a blank page or not. This function helps to reduce disk storage requirements for scanned images. Despeckle - Removes noise from images without blurring edges
• Border removal - Remove any or all image borders (black borders surrounding scanned document), with the ability to specify tolerance level for amount of noise, maximum border size, and variability of border size
• Dot removal - Remove dots, specks, and blobs from documents, specifying min and max dot size
• Hole Punch removal - Remove hole-punch artifacts, specifying min and max hole size and count
• Line removal - Remove horizontal and vertical lines from scanned images, with the ability to specify minimum line length, maximum line width, maximum gap for dashed or otherwise broken lines, tolerance values for line width variance, and other parameters to ensure that valid image obects are preserved
• Smoothing - Smooth the nicks and bumps on scanned text characters (or any black-on-white objects), specifying the minimum bump size
• Text Inversion - Areas on scanned image of white text (or line objects) on a black background are detected and inverted to black-on-white. You can specify minimum size and min and max percent-black of regions to be detected

LEADTOOLS ePrint Integration:
LEAD offers an entire line of LEADTOOLS imaging toolkits for programmers who wish to add imaging functionality to their applications. LEADTOOLS is the engine that ePrint is based upon, and offers the flexibility to accomplish any imaging development task. If you need an imaging toolkit for file format support and conversion, image processing, compression, and more, then LEADTOOLS is for you.

Benefits of Integrating ePrint with LEADTOOLS:

• Create ways to export file formats from existing applications
• Control the workflow of the print job (print logging, add print jobs to a database, etc)
• ePrint is another way to get images and data into LEADTOOLS
• and much more

Unicode Support:
Unicode is a character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium. The aim of the standard is to provide a universal way of encoding characters of any language, regardless of the computer system or platform being used. The core of Unicode, known as the Basic Multi-lingual Plane, contains space for over 65,000 characters. These include some 49,000 characters from the world's languages, include letters from alphabets, ideographs used in writing systems such as Chinese, and other characters such as currency and mathematical symbols. In addition to these, space is available for custom use, and supplementary code points are available for characters used in languages such as Chinese, where the total number of characters is not quantifiable.

The following LEADTOOLS features have been ported to support unicode:

Programming interfaces that include unicode support:

• LEADTOOLS API functions in the LEADTOOLS DLL's
• LEADTOOLS C++ Class libraries
• LEADTOOLS COM objects
• LEADTOOLS .NET Class Libraries

Raster Imaging features that support unicode:

• File loading and saving
• Image display
• Common dialogs
• Image processing
• TWAIN
• Digital Paint features
• Screen capture
• Special effects
• Internet imaging
• ImageList
• etc..

Document Imaging features that support unicode:

• Annotations
• DocClean
• Imaging processing
• MRC
• OCR (Document Imaging)

Medical Imaging features that support unicode:

• DICOM and DICOM Communications

Other features that support unicode:

• PDF
• Barcode

LEADTOOLS products that include unicode support:

• LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
• LEADTOOLS Vector Imaging
• LEADTOOLS Document Imaging
• LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging

Programming Interfaces:
Included programming interfaces: low level C DLL, C++ class libraries, COM objects, .NET class libraries and WPF XAML controls. LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro, Document and Medical Imaging products ship with sample source code for C, Visual C++ (MFC), VB, VB.NET and C#. Supported OS: 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows.

The following products include the Document Imaging SDK

• LEADTOOLS Document Imaging
• LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging