November 23, 2006:
This latest release of the LEADTOOLS family of imaging toolkits is packed with new and updated features. Using our 16 years of experience in developing superior imaging products, we have created our most comprehensive toolkit line yet.

• 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 image 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 compressed.
  • New Web Forms Demos

• 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
    • DJV
    • SID
    • TFX
    • PCT
    • FPX
    • WMZ
  • .NET Viewer and ImageList Enhancements
    • Multi-select with mouse
    • Rubberband select
    • Pan window with Annotations
    • Magnifying Glass with Annotations
    • Color Conversion Enhancements - Read and write ICC Profiles from images

• Medical Imaging
  • 32-bit Integer Grayscale support – load/save/display (DICOM/TIFF)
  • Complete native .NET support for DICOM and DICOM Communication
  • Unicode Support
  • New features added to Medical Image viewer
    • Annotations and image markup support, including conversion of existing annotation object(s) to a region.
    • Cine tool that allows playing stacked images and frames like a movie.
    • Ruler calibration.
    • Support for ROI (region of interest) with different types of region combine modes.
    • Easy access to the images managed by the container, which opens the door for manipulating these images through a wide range of image processing functions supported by LEADTOOLS.
    • New options for changing the appearance and other visual attributes of the container.
    • “Title Bar” feature that allows the user to show/hide a title bar that can be associated with every sub-cell managed by the container.

• Vector Format Enhancements
  • Transparency support for raster objects
  • Convert Polydraw into Polygon & Polylines
  • Support for units
  • Improved support for DWG, DXF and DWF formats
  • 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
    • EAN EXT 5
    • EAN EXT 2
    • MSI
    • CODE 11
    • Standard 2 of 5
    • Patch Code
    • PostNet

• 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:
  • Triangular-peaked weighting
  • Hermite
  • Bell
  • Quadratic B-Spline
  • Cubic B-Spline
  • BoxFilter (Nearest Neighbor)
  • Lanczos
  • Michell
  • Cosize
  • CatmullRom
  • Quadratic
  • Cubic Convolution
  • Bilinear
  • Bresenham

• 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.

• Support for saving 32-bit RGB-alpha JPEG2000 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.

• New features added to the Ltimg Image Processing dll
  • A new set of image processing functions and new features and options for existing functions.
  • New “Signed Image data” support for most of the existing medical image processing functions.
  • Split the Image Processing dll into four separate. This makes the product easier to use and more optimized for the web.

Multimedia

• 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).
• DVD image creation – allows you to create DVD images that can be burned onto DVD disks.
• DVD burning – allows you to burn DVD images onto DVD disks.
• Create and play files based on ISO media format (MP4, 3GPP, Quicktime, AVC, AAC). These files are used by most common portable media players (like iPOD, PSP, ZEN, Zune, etc) and the new generation of mobile phones
• 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.
• New codecs:
  • AC3 audio encoder (high quality audio used to create DVD with stereo or Dolby® surround 5.1 sound).
  • AAC audio codec (high quality audio with good compression). This is the standard audio compression used by MP4 files.
  • AMR audio codec (good quality compressor for low bitrates). Very good for streaming (video conferencing) and 3GPP files (files used by most mobile phones).

• Many filters are now included with the multimedia toolkit. Please click here for more details.
• New filter evaluation mechanism makes it easier to use LEAD DirectShow filters and codecs.
• Auto deinterlace option automatically enhances video quality for interlaced videos while preserving the quality of non-interlaced video.
• Bresenham resize options provide fast high quality resize algorithm.