Charlotte, NC (November 14, 2006) - - LEAD Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of imaging developer toolkits, today announced the release of LEADTOOLS version 15. LEADTOOLS is a collection of SDKs (software development kits) designed to help programmers integrate digital images into their applications. LEADTOOLS 15 introduces 64 bit support for the Raster, Document, Medical and Vector toolkit product lines. Now, programmers have more options to develop for Win32 x86, x64 and .NET x86, x64 platforms. Additionally, the LEADTOOLS engines have gained a dramatic increase in speed and performance, including encoders/decoders speed (CCITT G3/G4, JBIG, ABC, JPEG, etc) and enhanced performance of many of the image processing functions. Other new features and enhancements include new .NET Class libraries, Web Forms for ASP.NET, new Medical and Vector toolkit features, new Barcode types, as well a new NITF plug-in for Document Imaging and MPEG-2 Transport Stream module for Multimedia.

New in LEADTOOLS v.15

• 64 Bit Support - In addition to Win32 support, LEADTOOLS Raster, Document, Medical and Vector toolkits now provide support for developing applications to target Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit.  The toolkit includes 32 and 64-bit API, C++ Class Library and .NET Class Library interfaces.

• Dramatically Improved Performance - Increased speed of the LEADTOOLS engines including encoders/decoders (CCITT G3, CCITT G4, JBIG, ABC, JPEG, etc) and many of the imaging processing functions.

• Web Forms - Develop rich interactive web-based applications using ASP .NET.
  • A Web ImageViewer control for displaying an image on an ASP.NET 2.0 web form
  • The ImageViewer is used to display any image file format supported by web browsers (JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP).
  • Includes an HTTP handler to serve non-browser supported formats.
  • Large image support through tiling.
  • Includes an HTTP handler to get file information for files on the server or accessible via http.
  • The ImageViewer control can automatically handle zooming and scrolling.
  • Create Web applications that deal with huge images such as Geospatial imaging applications like Google™ Earth. Only the portions of the image required for display are downloaded and decompressed.

• New Features Added to the .NET Library
  • Special Effects for image display
  • Screen Capture
  • DICOM and DICOM Communication
  • Barcode reading and writing
  • New File Formats in .NET
  • .NET Viewer and ImageList Enhancements

• Medical Imaging
  • 32-bit Integer Grayscale support – load/save/display (DICOM/TIFF)
• Complete native .NET support for DICOM and DICOM Communication
• Unicode Support

• Vector Format Enhancements
  • Transparency support for raster objects
  • Added support for saving DGN
  • Added support for NAP format

• NITF Format Support
• The National Imagery Transmission Format Standard (NITFS) is the suite of standards for formatting and exchanging digital imagery and imagery-related products defined by the United States Department of Defense (US DOD). This standard allows for interoperability of systems used for formatting, transmitting, receiving, and processing imagery and imagery-related information.

• Barcode
• Improved Barcode Recognition accuracy
• Faster Barcode Recognition
• New Linear 1D Barcode types

• Support for saving 32-bit RGB-alpha images
• Support for lossy JPEG2000 compression of 32-bit images - the alpha can be saved either lossy or lossless. (i.e. the color components of the image can be saved as lossy while the alpha data is saved as lossless.)
• Support for controlling the active bits of the alpha channel has been added to improve the compression.

• Databind Support for .NET Viewer Control – Use the .NET database engine to store and retrieve images to/from any database supported by .NET.

• New interpolation options for image resize

• Image Histogram Dialog - Medical Imaging demo that shows how LEADTOOLS functionality can segment, redistribute, and remove noise from the image data. This demo supports most Medical image types including 12 and 16-bit grayscale images, images with signed or un-signed data, and images with a LUT.

• Printing function using GDI+ - A new function which uses GDI+ for optimized and fast printing of images. It produces a smaller spooler file size, which will increase the speed of the printing over a network.

• MPEG-2 Transport Stream Module
  • Allows you to play MPEG-2 Transport and MPEG-2 Program files from a file or UDP stream. Perfect for applications that accept video streams from hardware encoders, such as video from satellites and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). Demos are available with source code that demonstrate how to handle metadata stored in such streams (especially KLV).

• Enhanced H.264 support – Increased speed for H.264 encoding and decoding.
  • The new, faster H.264 compression produces great quality and requires very small bitrates. The combination of this fast low bitrate video compression with a newly added AMR low bitrate audio CODEC, LEAD's network multiplexer/Demultiplexer, and three sample applications with source code demonstrates the power of the new video conference technologies at work. Developers can develop a complete video conferencing application using bandwidth as low as 35K, 128K and 256K transfer bitrate. A delay that is less than 1/2 second allows normal conversation to be carried all over the world using realtime audio and video compression.
  • The new encoder and decoder make use of the multi-core capability of the new CPUs.
  • The decoder can play HD videos in real time.

For more information on the complete list of new features in v.15, visit http://www.leadtools.com/home2/new-in-v15.htm

Availabilty and Pricing
LEADTOOLS v.15 SDKs are available for immediate purchase through the LEADTOOLS website or by calling LEAD sales at 800-637-4699. Purchase may also be made through one of LEAD's authorized resellers or distributors.

Full Imaging evaluation toolkits are available free of charge from LEAD's website http://www.leadtools.com

About LEAD Technologies
Since 1990, LEAD Technologies, Inc. has been a global leader in the imaging developer toolkit market, providing programmers with feature-rich tools to “image-enable” their software applications. LEAD Technologies pioneered the fastest software-only image compression and continues to lead the field in advancing new imaging technologies and offering those technologies to programmers world wide.

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