What's new in LEADTOOLS V17 ?

July 15, 2010: Known worldwide as the #1 Imaging toolkit developer, LEAD is pleased to release LEADTOOLS Version 17, an extensive offering of new imaging technology and enhancements.
A substantial portion of LEADTOOLS functionality including image format load and save, image processing, compression, display, effects and annotation is optimized to support 100% pure Silverlight development and can be used in Silverlight without external dependencies or server calls.
LEAD also now offers a .NET class library solution and x64 bit OS support for all functionality across the Document, Medical, Multimedia, and Raster imaging engines. LEADTOOLS 17 also includes an all new Medical 3D engine, an Arabic OCR engine and major enhancements to OCR, Forms Recognition and Medical/PACS modules. This new version is especially suitable for developers in the document, medical and multimedia imaging communities who are looking for advanced imaging features and tools for rapid development with the stability, performance and support LEADTOOLS customers have come to expect.

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Document Engine

Optimized internal core functions to dramatically increase the speed of image handling and processing.
New Silverlight viewers. Image viewer, image list, pan window, and magnifying glass pixel shader.
New Silverlight codecs. Load, save and convert more than 100 formats and subformats including TIFF, JBIG, JBIG2, IOCA, FAX (CCITT Group3/4), JPEG 2000, JPEG, BMP, CALS, GIF, PNG, TGA, DICOM, and EXIF in Silverlight clients.
New Silverlight image processing functions. Process images on Silverlight clients with more than 130 advanced image processing functions including bicubic and favor black resize, border, dot, hole punch and line removal.
New Silverlight annotations. Load, save, create and edit image annotations (markups) in Silverlight clients. Annotation object types include Rectangle, Ellipse, Highlight, Line, Redact, Text, Ruler, Protractor, CrossProduct, Image, TextPointer, Point, Curve, Point, Polygon and Polyline.
New Silverlight pixel shaders. Apply visual effects in Silverlight clients with more than 150 pixel shaders.
Load PowerPoint, XLS and XLSX files as images.
Save linearized PDF and PDF/A files.
Export LEADTOOLS annotations as PDF documents.
Create PDF bookmarks.
New Arabic OCR module. Convert images of Arabic text into text, DOC, PDF and more.
Improved Asian OCR engine recognition results. Improved support for Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese character sets.
New text orientation options to recognize vertical, left rotated and right rotated text.
New DOCX and XLSX output for OCR and Document Writers.
Improved table detection in the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine.
Enhanced font detection in the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine to include the detection of bold, italic, mono and proportional spacing.
Improved accuracy and speed of the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine.
Expanded constrained ICR support to be included with the LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine.
New Forms Recognition and Processing applications with project source code to define master forms, and to recognize and process forms.

Added in "V17.01" December 24, 2010:

The LEADTOOLS Document Engine is broadening horizons and customer bases with its new Windows Phone 7 toolkit. Utilizing Silverlight, developers can now extend LEADTOOLS' award-winning file format support, image processing, image viewers and annotations to Windows Phone devices. Additional file formats and OCR improvements are also a part of this exciting release.

New Windows Phone7 SDK - Develop applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform.
Added support for Microsoft Office 2007 formats: Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.pptx)
WPF and Silverlight Annotations now support Rich Text and Audio/Video Objects
Multi-touch support for Silverlight Windows Phone
OCR Auto-Recognize enhancements for infinite pages, multi-threading, pre-processing and logging
Support for JBIG2 files with non-sequential headers (random-access).

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Medical Engine

Optimized internal core functions to dramatically increase the speed of image handling and processing.
New Silverlight DICOM dataset support. Create, load, view, edit and save DICOM datasets including pixel data, elements and annotations in Silverlight clients.
New Silverlight viewers. Image viewer, image list, pan window, and magnifying glass pixel shader.
New Silverlight codecs. Load, save and convert more than 100 formats and subformats including DICOM, TIFF, JBIG, JBIG2, IOCA, FAX (CCITT Group3/4), JPEG 2000, JPEG, BMP, CALS, GIF, PNG, TGA, and EXIF in Silverlight clients.
New Silverlight image processing functions. Process images on Silverlight clients with more than 130 advanced image processing functions including Window Level, Multiscale Enhancement, Tissue Equalization, Adaptive Contrast, Unsharp Mask, Auto Segment, Digital Subtract and Add Bitmaps.
New Silverlight annotations. Load, save, create and edit image annotations (markups) in Silverlight clients. Annotation object types include Rectangle, Ellipse, Highlight, Line, Redact, Text, Ruler, Protractor, CrossProduct, Image, TextPointer, Point, Curve, Point, Polygon and Polyline.
New Silverlight pixel shaders. Apply visual effects such as Window Level in Silverlight clients with more than 150 pixel shaders.
New Medical 3D module. Construct and view a 3-dimensional volume from a set of homogenous 2-dimensional medical images. Provides several rendering methods and tools for advanced visualization including MPR, VRT, MIP, MinIP and SSD. Viewing options include planes, clip, slab, scale, zoom, threshold, image processing, and full camera control. 3D rendering can be stand alone or hosted in the high-level LEADTOOLS Medical Image Viewer control to leverage the built-in tools and automation provided by the viewer control.
New support included with the LEADTOOLS PACS Framework:
- New DICOM Router components. Route images to one or more PACS based on user-defined business rules.
- New DICOM Work List components. IHE compliant server and client components for Modality Work List (MWL), Modality Performed Procedure Step (MPPS).
- New DICOM High-Level Storage, Query and Retrieve Services. IHE compliant server and client components for DICOM Storage, Query and Retrieve.
Updates to the LEADTOOLS PACS Workstation Framework
- Added support to create, manipulate and render 3D volumes from DICOM stacks.
- Added cut-plane on 2D DICOM slices to generate 3D volumes with interactive support for positioning, orientation and volume thickness.
- Added DICOM series reference line and orientation tag support.
- Added extensive options to control the process of DICOM image storage into the Workstation database with the ability to generate images with different formats.
- Enhanced Workstation listener service logging and added new event log viewer.
New Print to PACS application with project source code. Captures image data from printer driver, TWAIN, WIA, image file, clipboard, or screen capture and then saves the resultant DICOM file to disk or stores it to PACS using C-STORE. Includes options to get the required metadata from manual entry, Modality WorkList or PACS Queries.
Updates to layout control in the LEADTOOLS Medical Viewer
- Supports unconstrained (non-grid) cell layouts.
- Cells can host other WinForm controls such as the InternetBrowserControl.
- Cells can be hosted by other WinForm controls.
- Added new 3D cell type to the Medical Image Viewer control to render and manipulate 3D volumes providing several rendering methods and tools for advanced visualization including MPR, VRT, MIP, MinIP and SSD.
- Viewing options include planes, clip, slab, scale, zoom, threshold, image processing, and full camera control.
- Added image overlapping.
New image processing functions:
- New tissue equalization function to enhance x-ray images by performing equalization between hard and soft tissues.
- New anisotropic diffusion function to enhance medical images by removing noise while maintaining image integrity.
- New auto segment image processing function to automatically segment CT and MRI images by shrinking a defined rectangular region onto objects in the image.
- New mean shift image processing filter to enhance images based on the color distance of a pixel and the pixels in a radius of inspection.
New DICOM dataset edit control.
Import and export DICOM to XML to easily edit and compare DICOM datasets.
Up to date DICOM IOD tables.
New support for the Analyze medical file format.

Added in "V17.01" December 24, 2010:

Core Medical Features

IPV6 support for DICOM Communication
.NET MedicalViewer control now has the option to use LEADTOOLS .NET annotations for simplified customization and management.
Multi-language character support for loading and saving both ideographic and phonetic characters within the same DICOM element.

Workstation Framework

Media Creation Management - Burn CDs/DVDs with DICOMDIR and viewer
New Workstation Viewer Layout option showing series thumbnails and selected full-size image
Store annotations on the server and load from any Workstation Client
Assign shortcut keys for modality-specific window level presets to quickly adjust the display for specific tissues or pathologies
Customizable patient orientation flips and rotates the image based on Patient Position, Modality, or any other DICOM Tag
Chronological Timeline with thumbnails of studies and series to save time reviewing patient history

3D Enhancements

Optimized overall performance and speed
Improved resource management, allowing more 3D volumes to be opened at the same time
Improved SSD management allows loading multiple meshes at a time
Worked around the 2GB memory limitation in 32-bit Windows which previously limited the number of volumes you could have open at once to just a few. Now you are limited only by the amount of virtual memory on your system.

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Raster Engine

Optimized internal core functions to dramatically increase the speed of image handling and processing.
.NET 4.0 binaries
New Visual Studio 2010 projects from all .NET and Silverlight sample applications
Enhanced WPF viewer controls
WPF Pixel Shaders
Added multi-monitor support to screen capture
Load PowerPoint files as an image
Load Word Doc files as an image
Load Excel XLS files as an image
Added folder watch feature to the LEADTOOLS Thumbnail Browser so that the Thumbnail Browser can automatically update when files are modified, added or deleted to the folder.

Added in "V17.01" December 24, 2010:

The LEADTOOLS Imaging Engine and addons received several new file formats as well as expanded support for newer format editions and versions. The most significant change was the redesign of the PDF Read Engine which has expanded its support and features while reducing complexity and deployment footprint.

New File formats including VFF (Sun TAAC Bitmap), PCL6 and JPM (JPEG2000 part 6)
Multi-thread support in PDF Read Engine
Single DLL redist for PDF Read Engine
Automatically detect the best rasterization options by examining the contents of the PDF including bits per pixel, original resolution, compression and version
Added support for saving PDF version 1.6 files
Added support for Code 128 A, B, & C subtypes, including double density mode, to the Barcode 1D engine
New VC++ 2010 versions of C/C++ libraries

What's new in the LEADTOOLS Multimedia Engine

New 64 bit binaries for capture, conversion and playback, filters and codecs such as H.264, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2.
New .NET class library for multimedia capture, conversion and playback.
New support to capture video from HD digital tuners.
New LEAD RTSP source filter. Play RTSP streams in the following formats: H.264 video, JPEG video and AAC audio.
LEAD MPEG-2 Transport UDP Source accepts raw RTP streams.

New additions and changes to the LEADTOOLS Product Line

LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Suite - Includes all of the features of the LEADTOOLS PACS Imaging product plus the functionality of the LEADTOOLS Medical 3D Module and Medical Multimedia Module.
Medical 3D module. Construct and view a 3-dimensional volume from a set of homogenous 2-dimensional medical images. Provides several rendering methods and tools for advanced visualization including MPR, VRT, MIP, MinIP and SSD. Viewing options include planes, clip, slab, scale, zoom, threshold, image processing, and full camera control. 3D rendering can be stand alone or hosted in the high-level LEADTOOLS Medical Image Viewer control to leverage the built-in tools and automation provided by the viewer control.
LEADTOOLS Arabic OCR Module - Convert images of Arabic text into text, DOC, PDF and more.
LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Enterprise is now LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite.

With the release of LEADTOOLS Version 17, LEAD reinforces its position as the world leading developer of imaging and imaging related SDKs. LEAD is dedicated to being the only choice for developers who want a comprehensive and time-tested imaging SDK that stays at the forefront of new imaging technologies and development paradigms.

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