Welcome to LEADTOOLS

by LEAD Technologies, Inc.

Since 1990, LEAD Technologies has been providing advanced imaging tools to developers. LEADTOOLS is used by thousands of developers distributing world class applications deployed on millions of PCs throughout the world.  LEADTOOLS is the most comprehensive, robust, flexible, and powerful imaging SDK solution available and is ideal for developers involved in still-frame, multimedia, document, medical, and vector imaging desktop, service and web projects.

LEADTOOLS supports the latest Microsoft technologies targeting Windows versions including 2000, 2003/2008 Server, XP, Vista, and 7. LEADTOOLS includes Win32 and x64 libraries for .NET, Silverlight,  C, and C++, WCF services, Windows Workflow Foundation activities, and controls for WPF, AJAX, Silverlight and .NET. Additionally, 32-bit ActiveX controls are available.

As our customer, you will have access to the most advanced imaging technology available and will receive the best technical support in the business.  Thank you for the opportunity to earn your business.

The Getting Started with LEADTOOLS help file is designed to provide you with:

• Information about the LEADTOOLS DLLs, binaries, libraries, header files, import libraries, and classes used to support each LEADTOOLS feature.

• Directions to the help file in which to find the documentation that supports each feature.

• Directions to sample program source code that demonstrates each feature.

• Links to sample program executables that demonstrate each feature.

Key Features of LEADTOOLS:

• File Formats. Read, write and convert image files in over 150 of the most popular standard image formats, including JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, TIFF including G3/G4, LZW, CMYK and JTIF, PNG, BMP, MODCA/IOCA, PCX, TGA, PDF, and XPS.

• Image Compression. Compress images using the best and fastest compression algorithms, such as JPEG, JPEG2000, CMP, CMW, ABC, LZW, G3/G4, Huffman, ABIC, MRC, JBIG, JBIG2, and run-length. LEADTOOLS offers comprehensive support for compression schemes found in standard raster file formats, as well as high-performance proprietary compression technologies that outperform the industry standards.

• PDF and PDF/A. Load, save, convert and compress raster and text searchable PDF files. Convert to and from any supported format. Capture printer output to PDF. Save OCR results as text searchable PDF.

• Image Display. Paint images and regions with transparency while controlling zoom, scale, fit, pan, scroll, brightness and contrast settings. LEADTOOLS can automatically reduce the colors based on the display device with dithering and palette control. Additionally, LEADTOOLS provides image-list and thumbnail browser controls, a user interactive magnifying-glass tool, as well as an automated pan-window.

• Bitonal Scaling. Greatly enhance the on-screen quality and readability of resized black and white images using LEADTOOLS display options.

• Annotation / Image Markup. Overlay images with a variety of annotation objects such as text, lines, shapes, arrows, buttons, highlights, hot spots, sticky notes, stamps and buttons in C, C++, .NET, WPF and Silverlight projects.

• Image Processing. Use more than 200 digital filters and transforms to process images or regions of interest. Functions include deskew, smooth, sharpen, edge detect/enhance, modify brightness/contrast/gamma, change hue and saturation, red-eye removal, unsharp mask, add noise. Resize and rotate images using various resampling techniques including bicubic. Most image functions support both signed and unsigned images.

• Document Cleanup. Automatically straighten (deskew) an image (including proprietary functions for deskewing scanned bank checks), remove noise (despeckle), and remove borders, hole punches, lines and inverted text. LEADTOOLS Document Imaging cleanup functions are especially useful when working with images from scanners or FAX machines.

• Scanning (TWAIN / WIA). Control image acquisition from any TWAIN or WIA device including scanners and digital cameras. Use a device driver’s built in user-interface or create your own. Query a TWAIN source to determine TWAIN features the driver has implemented. The LEADTOOLS Fast TWAIN feature will automatically set the optimal settings to maximize scanning speed and performance.

• Barcode. Detect, read and write 1D and 2D barcodes within an image.

• OCR / ICR. Add multi-threaded OCR to projects and utilize multiple cores to maximize performance. Convert images of text (machine print or hand written) in Latin, Asian, Arabic and MICR character sets. Output results as several supported formats including text searchable PDF, DOC and HTML to disk or memory.

• OMR. Process check boxes and bubble sheets in forms, ballots, surveys and tests.

• Forms Recognition and Processing. Automatically recognize images as a specific form and then pull data from predefined fields.

• Document Writers. Convert printer output and EMF to a variety of document formats such as PDF, DOC, HTML, XPS, RTF and text.

• Virtual Printer. Capture output with LEADTOOLS advanced and programmable virtual printer driver.

• Printing. Print images or regions of interest while controlling position, scaling, half-toning and dithering. Print multiple images and text to a single or multiple pages.

• Common Dialogs. LEADTOOLS imaging common dialogs combine Windows Common Dialog functionality with LEADTOOLS imaging functionality. Common dialogs are provided for every LEADTOOLS image processing function, plus additional functions such as FileOpen and FileSave. All strings can be customized or localized for globalization.

• Medical Image Viewer Control. Use the Medical Image Viewer Control to provide support for the display and manipulation of one or more medical images.

• 3D. Create 3D volumes from 2D slices and then render them on the screen using a variety of rendering methods and tools to improve visualization including MPR, VRT, MIP, MinIP and SSD. Viewing options include planes, clip, slab, scale, zoom, threshold, image processing, and full camera control.

• 12 and 16 bit grayscale images. Load, process, display, window level and save 12 and 16 bit grayscale images including DICOM and TIFF formats.

• Window leveling. Detect and set LowBit and HighBit for image data, display images with automatic LUT intensity expansion, or set LUT entries and ranges with specific values and gradients. Display images through the LUT without changing the data, or process the image data using the LUT. Linearize the number of pixels locally in a bitmap, based on the specified color space in order to bring out the detail in dark areas of an image, and smooth the edges between blocks.

• DICOM Dataset. LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging toolkits provide complete support for the DICOM 3.0 specification including all IOD classes and modalities such as CR, CT, MR, NM, US, RF, SC and VL, and complete DICOM Basic Directory support.

• DICOM Communication / PACS. Provide complete support for DICOM Communications, including all Service Classes such as Verification, Storage, Query/Retrieve and Patient Management. Contains high-level communications functions simplifying the creation of DICOM SCU and SCP.

• DICOM Security. Support the Secure Transport Connection Profiles as specified in part 15 of the DICOM 3 standard.

• Silverlight. Silverlight controls and libraries for image display, annotation, image processing, PixelShaders and DICOM.  The functionality of the Silverlight controls and libraries can be extended to include virtually every feature of LEADTOOLS with WCF services.

• Web Forms (AJAX). LEADTOOLS AJAX support enables you to add fast, interactive image viewing to your web applications.

• Multimedia. Add Multimedia functionality such as capture, play, convert and processing to projects. Integrate DirectShow filters and support a long list of multimedia formats and compression techniques. Including H.264, MPEG2 and MPEG4.

• CD and DVD. Create, capture, author, burn and play DVDs and CDs.

• Video Streaming. Stream multimedia with IIS, Windows Media Server or LEADTOOLS proprietary network protocols.

• MPEG-2 Transport. Create, stream and play MPEG-2 Transport streams. Create and parse KLV data to create implementations of specifications such as UAV Datalink Local Metadata, and Predator UAV Basic Universal Metadata Set.

• DVR. Pause, rewind, and jump to live on any live source including web cams, tv tuners, and network streams (UDP and TCP/IP).

• JPIP (JPEG2000 Interactive Protocol). Plug high-level components into enterprise client/server applications so that the applications can immediately start streaming high-resolution images under low HTTP bandwidth connections.

• NITF. Load, save and manipulate the National Imagery Transmission Format in your Windows applications.

• Vector. Add vector load, edit, save, conversion and display functionality to projects.

• Image Optimizer. Optimize images for websites or to maximize storage space by automatically and intelligently reducing colors and maximizing compression.

• Color Conversion. Support images ranging from 1 to 64 bits per pixel and can convert from any supported bits per pixel to any other supported bits per pixel.

• Color Space Conversion. Convert, separate and reconstruct images from individual RGB, CMYK, CMY, HSV, HSL, YUV, YIQ, CIELAB, XYZ, YCCK, Y41P, UYVY, YUY2, YVU9 and YCC color planes using LEAD's built in conversion functions, ICC color profiles or Emulation Tables.

• Screen Capture. Capture all or part of the screen. Use capture with any of the LEADTOOLS image processing functions and save to any file format that LEAD supports.

Supported Environments:

LEADTOOLS comes in Win32 and x64 editions. The environments supported depend upon the specific product, platform and function. For more information, refer to Supported Platforms / Operating Systems.