LEAD TECHNOLOGIES ANNOUNCES LEADTOOLS JPEG2000

Charlotte, NC (June 19, 2001) - - LEAD Technologies, Inc., a LEADing provider of imaging developer toolkits, announces the release of LEADTOOLS JPEG2000. JPEG2000 is a multi-resolution format, which contains several stored resolutions in non-redundant form. A JPEG2000 file can then be transmitted or decoded to the resolution most suited to the chosen display device. One important point of this new image compression/decompression standard is that it specifies only the decoding algorithm and the compressed data format. The encoder algorithm has been purposefully left open to encourage competition and improvements. LEAD Technologies has used its more than ten years in the imaging and compression developer toolkit marketplace to formulate a JPEG2000 product that offers developers the best JPEG2000 implementation available.

Rich Little, President of LEAD Technologies explains, "We are excited that the JPEG committee has left the compression portion of the standard open, because it allows LEAD to leverage our image compression experience to provide a JPEG2000 implementation that will easily separate LEAD from other JPEG providers."

LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 compression/decompression conforms fully to the JPEG2000 Part I International Standard. This new state-of-the-art ISO/ITU still image compression standard provides a fast and flexible solution for high-quality, wavelet-based compression. LEAD has committed to fully support all future parts as they are released and therefore LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 will continue to grow as the JPEG2000 standard grows.

Just a few of the benefits of LEADTOOLS JPEG2000

• Superior compression performance.
• Lossless and lossy compression capability.
• Progressive decompression of images by resolution, quality, color channel, and spatial location.
• Incorporates many optional error resilience strategies so that in the event of transmission error the decoded image quality is partially degraded.
• Optional JP2 file format.
• Ability to control the compressed file size quite precisely without iterative approach.
• Ability to compress color and grayscale images.

LEADTOOLS JPEG2000 is available as a plug-in to any LEADTOOLS v. 12.1 toolkit.

-###-

About LEAD Technologies, Inc.
Founded in 1990, LEAD grew out of years of research headed by Moe Daher to find a comprehensive compression standard for digital images. LEAD is now the world-leading supplier of imaging development toolkits, providing technology of the future, today. LEAD brings to the market the most innovative and technically superior products that provide the greatest possible value for its customers. LEAD’s award winning imaging technology is chosen by Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Boeing, Xerox and thousands of other companies for use in their high volume applications and internal systems.