Our marketing department's media team has produced a new video highlighting the new and improved features within the LEADTOOLS OCR Engine in Version 18, including Faster Recognition, Zonal and Full Page Recognition, Image Over Text PDF, Tables and Cells, Dithered Text and Underlined Text Recognition. Take a couple minutes to learn about these exciting features, and we hope you enjoy the video!

We plan on releasing more videos just like this one covering other major feature sets like HTML5, PACS, DICOM, Barcode and more. As always, we welcome any feedback and would love to know what you think about our new videos, and/or let us know what you'd like to see next.

While making my rounds through the engineering department, the OCR team showed me some really impressive enhancements to the Advantage OCR engine coming soon. They've accomplished a lot, but my personal favorite is what they've done to the Advantage OCR engine's preprocessing algorithm. With much sweat, tears and coffee, they've fine-tuned the noise removal algorithm with impressive results. Other engines may have difficulty seeing between the lines (literally) when forms and documents use separator bars or boxes for individual characters. LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR Engine is doing a superb job at intelligently removing the noise and returning only the text of interest, rather than getting hung up on bars, dashes, speckles and other types of noise that should simply be ignored.

Other than the obvious benefit of improved accuracy, this is especially helpful for customers using forms recognition where character separators are prevalent. On documents where it might have been necessary to use a separate zone for each character and piece them together post-recognition, now only a single zone is needed since the separator bars and cells will no longer be taken into account.

We are very excited about the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™, and we've been inviting everyone to take advantage of our powerful multi-platform imaging technology by publishing free apps for WinRT, Android and today, iOS. Just like the WinRT and Android apps, these applications were fully approved for the App Store, and the source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processing
• LEADTOOLS OCR
• LEADTOOLS Barcode
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer

Now that LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ has successfully run the gauntlet for each app market for Windows, Android and Apple, developers using LEADTOOLS can rest easy knowing that one of the most crucial steps in their application development life-cycle has already been proven feasible, which is something not every third party SDK can guarantee.

This is a slight rabbit trail away from our LEADTOOLS Version 18 preview series, but very exciting news nonetheless. We have published a new article on The CodeProject showing how easy it is to use our new iOS imaging SDK to perform OCR and Barcode recognition on your iPhone or iPad.

You might be thinking to yourself, "how is this possible? Version 18 isn't released yet!" Several customers have shown interest since the announcement of Version 18 and we have created a beta trial package of our iOS and OS X development libraries! Check out the main iOS and OS X SDK page to see what's included and how to get your hands on this exclusive beta program!