Technical FAQs

Join us for an engaging webinar with Dan Lee, Senior Product Manager at Accusoft, as we unravel the potential of AI for revolutionizing document management within your ECM.

Key Insights to be Discussed:

• Document Automation with AI
  Learn how AI technologies can streamline document-related tasks, such as data extraction, classification, and indexing
• Document Search and Retrieval Enhancement
  Discover the transformative power of AI-driven semantic search, enhancing document navigation and boosting decision-making and productivity.
• Security and Compliance
  Explore how AI plays a pivotal role in bolstering document security and ensuring compliance with industry regulations.

This webinar will delve into real-world cases showcasing PrizmDoc AI Integrations for PII identification within documents.

Key Take-Aways:

• How to configure PrizmDoc AI to identify PII in documents in your environment
• How to use PrizmDoc AI for PII detection
• Understanding of potential future PrizmDoc AI Integrations to further streamline your document workflow

Don’t miss this opportunity to shape the future of document management with AI.

Although often considered a bit old fashioned, the insurance industry has made great strides in recent years to adapt to the changing needs of its customers. The latest generation of insurance customers expects faster service, better support, and more options from providers. Given these pressures, it’s no surprise that InsurTech developers have found ample opportunities to deliver solutions that help insurance firms better manage their workflows and create better customer experiences.

Despite the successes of this digital transformation, however, there are still a number of challenges that InsurTech developers face when building new applications. Investing heavily in creating powerful AI and big data tools might help those platforms stand out from the crowd, but they won’t find much success with firms if they don’t also provide the core functionality organizations need to service their customers. 

That’s why many InsurTech developers are turning to versatile SDK and API integrations to expand their feature sets without compromising their development timelines.

4 Major Challenges of InsurTech Applications

1. Security and Privacy

As the insurance industry continues to shift toward digital processes and platforms, it’s become more important than ever for InsurTech applications to keep sensitive data secure. While most organizations do invest in cybersecurity protections, they often don’t realize how their own practices could potentially pose a risk to customer information. This is especially true of insurers that rely on third-party programs for various tasks like document viewing and editing. Take, for instance, the case of Folksam Group, which inadvertently shared client data from as many as one million customers with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Adobe in late 2020. 

2. File Management

Today’s insurers are receiving all kinds of documents, files, and images from their customers, which creates something of a document dilemma. A single auto accident claim, for instance, might have valuable information spread across multiple PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheet files, scanned images of hand-written forms, and image files. In order to process claims quickly and effectively, firms need InsurTech solutions that provide an all-in-one solution that can handle a broad array of file formats. Without these file management tools, insurers will be forced to use multiple programs to meet their needs, which creates inefficient dependencies and increases security risks.

3. Data Collection

Insurance companies gather quite a bit of information from form applications, both in physical and digital formats. Unfortunately, transferring that information from a form document into an InsurTech system is often a laborious manual process. Not only is manual data collection time consuming, it also increases the likelihood of human error. Even when firms do implement an InsurTech solution with forms processing capabilities, however, they often lack the capability to read certain types of form fields, especially those completed by hand. The ability to adapt to new form templates is also critical for organizations that want to invest in automation. 

4. Remote Collaboration

The COVID-19 pandemic may have forced insurance offices to rapidly embrace a remote work strategy, but many firms had already been investing in some form of hybrid work model for years. Nationwide was able to transition 98 percent of its workforce to remote status precisely because the company already had the technology solutions in place to allow insurance agents to work from home. Without some way of facilitating remote collaboration directly through InsurTech applications, organizations end up relying on email, which poses serious security concerns. Furthermore, with multiple copies of a document being distributed and downloaded, it quickly becomes difficult to know which version incorporates the most up-to-date changes.

SDK and API InsurTech Solutions

Building new functionality into an application always involves a tradeoff. When developers choose to code something from scratch, that means pulling team members away from another project or extending the product’s release timeline. In a fast-moving industry where InsurTech developers are racing competitors to be the first to market, it doesn’t make sense to design and build every aspect of an application in-house. 

Rather than pulling valuable development resources away from their innovative InsurTech features, developers can solve common insurance challenges much faster with SDK toolkits and API integrations. 

Secure File Viewing

The easiest way for InsurTech solutions to keep documents secure is to integrate HTML5 viewing capabilities directly into the application. Rather than being forced to download or open a file for viewing in a third-party application, employees can view multiple document formats natively. This is critical because it means no data will be shared with third-party programs.  Since the files remain safely within the secure InsurTech environment, firms can also control the level of access to any document, which prevents unauthorized individuals from downloading or viewing the contents. Thanks to API-based integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Viewer, InsurTech developers can help their applications safely view more than 100 unique file types without any third-party dependencies.

Data Capture

By integrating forms processing capabilities into their applications, InsurTech developers can provide their clients with powerful tools that allow them to gather essential data quickly and accurately. As the essential connective tissue between customers and insurance databases, form field recognition integrations use OCR technology to intelligently identify form data and extract it for processing. They can also be set up to identify a wide range of insurance forms to quickly identify and scan documents to streamline processing workflows. Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms even goes a step further by incorporating powerful image cleanup functionality to ensure that data will be extracted as accurately as possible.

File Conversion

In order to meet the file management challenges of today’s insurance providers, InsurTech developers need document and image processing integrations that can read and write multiple file formats. Information spread across multiple documents, emails, or even texts can be processed using OCR technology, and then consolidated and converted into a variety of formats for easy reference and collaboration. Rather than juggling several files with different dependencies, an SDK integration like Accusoft’s ImageGear can easily output processed files in PDF, RTF, XML, or DOCX format for viewing and editing within a single application.

Editing and Annotation

Providing secure document viewing capabilities solves only one half of the insurance collaboration challenge. InsurTech applications also need to provide both internal and external stakeholders with the ability to edit and markup documents throughout the application and claims process. Content processing integrations can allow authorized users to make changes to documents completely within their InsurTech solution and review markups and comments from other collaborators. 

Since all editing occurs within the application itself, there’s no need to worry about anyone downloading a document to make changes locally and creating confusion over which version is the most up-to-date. Redactions may also be necessary to hide private or confidential information from unauthorized viewers. As an added benefit, PrizmDoc Viewer’s editing features allow users to make a variety of markups and redactions while preserving the integrity of the original file.

Accelerate Your InsurTech Application Development with Accusoft

Accusoft’s collection of powerful SDK toolkits and API integrations provide innovative InsurTech developers with the resources they need to solve core insurance industry challenges. By implementing proven functionality into their applications, project managers can streamline the development process and dedicate more resources to the innovative features that will set their platform apart from the competition.

Whether you’re looking to incorporate versatile document viewing and editing or need a more accurate forms processing solution, Accusoft’s family of InsurTech SDKs and APIs can help your development team get to market faster. Learn more about what our products can do for your application in our InsurTech fact sheet.

Barcodes continue to be an essential tool for today’s organizations, whether they’re using them for managing supply chains or sorting documents within a complex digital workflow. Since the early 1990s, however, the potential use cases of barcodes have expanded tremendously. That’s largely due to the invention of the quick response barcode, better known as the QR Code. Developed by the Japanese manufacturer Denso Wave in 1994, this two-dimensional barcode revolutionized the way data was encoded and scanned. Today, QR Codes can be found practically everywhere, along with their smaller cousins, the Micro QR Code.

What Is a Micro QR Code?

Although the standard QR Code could hold a tremendous amount of information, that ability occasionally created challenges for specialized use cases where space was at a premium. Small components like circuit boards or machinery parts, for example, often couldn’t accommodate a QR Code. Even when they could, much of the QR Code’s storage capacity wasn’t being used to its full potential. For use cases where space was at a premium and only a small amount of data needed to be encoded, a more compact version of the QR Code was needed.

The Micro QR Code was designed to solve this specific challenge. Roughly half the size of the conventional QR Code, this smaller version still provided many of the benefits of its bigger cousin, including finder patterns to orient the image properly, multiple levels of error correction, and support for Japanese Kanji, Kana, and Hiragana characters.

The Anatomy of a Micro QR Code

A Micro QR Code consists of four elements that allow it to encode data and provide a barcode reader with instructions for how to read the contents.

Data Modules

Like any other QR Code, Micro QR Codes store binary data in square modules. While the human eye only registers the black modules, a computer scanner also registers white modules when reading the code. A black square represents a binary 1 while white squares are read as a binary 0. The amount of information that can be encoded into these modules changes depending upon the size of the barcode. Micro QR Codes can be written in four different sizes (more on that in a moment), allowing them to store up to 35 numeric digits, 21 alphanumeric characters, or 128 data bits.

Finder Pattern

The finder pattern is the square “bull’s eye” that appears in the upper-left hand corner of a Micro QR Code. This pattern ensures that the barcode is oriented and scanned correctly when read by an application. Since Micro QR Codes contain less complex data, they only require a single pattern finder while a conventional QR Code uses three. While many QR Codes also require an alignment pattern to correct for crookedness or distortion, Micro QR Codes are not large enough for these problems to create much of an issue during scanning.

Timing Pattern

A series of alternating black and white modules running vertically along the left side and horizontally along top of the barcode, the timing pattern is used to configure the rest of the data grid for the scanner. By reading the timing pattern, the scanner software can quickly determine the size of the barcode’s data matrix, as well as the symbol and version density.

Quiet Zone

A clear margin space surrounding the rest of the barcode elements, the quiet zone makes the boundaries easy for scanning software to detect and identify. While a conventional QR Code requires four or more modules of empty space, a Micro QR Code only needs a two module-wide space. This helps to keep the barcode compact regardless of how much data is encoded within it.

Micro QR Code Sizes and Error Correction

Depending upon the amount of data encoded, Micro QR Codes can be written in one of four sizes. The smallest version, M1, consists of 11×11 modules, while the largest, M4, is 17×17 modules. Each size above M1 can support different levels of error correction, although the more thorough the error correction, the less data can be encoded.

Error correction is based on the Reed-Solomon algorithm and allows scanning software to recover lost, poorly printed, or damaged barcode data. Versions M2 and M3 offer two levels of error correction:

• Level L (Low): Capable of recovering up to seven percent of encoded data.
• Level M (Medium): Capable of recovering up to 15 percent of encoded data.

As mentioned above, higher levels of error correction impact the amount of data that can be encoded into Micro QR Code modules. That’s because the redundancies necessary to support error correction algorithms take up available space. Increasing an M3 barcode’s error correction from level L to Level M, for instance, would reduce the number of numeric characters that could be supported from 23 to 18.

An M4 Micro QR Code contains enough modules to support a third level of error correction:

• Level Q (Quartile): Capable of recovering up to 25 percent of encoded data.

Although level Q provides excellent durability, it leaves much less space for encoding data. An M4 barcode with this level of error correction actually holds less data than an M3 barcode with level L error correction. When writing a Micro QR Code, it’s important to determine what level of error correction is actually necessary for the use case at hand rather than simply defaulting to the most robust option.

Differences Between Micro QR Codes and Conventional QR Codes

While Micro QR Codes use many of the same 2d barcode principles as traditional QR Codes, it’s not quite accurate to think of them as a condensed version. They have some notable differences that make them more or less suited to specific use cases.

Micro QR Codes

• Provide up to three levels of error correction.
• Needs only a single finder pattern for orientation.
• Can encode up to 128 bits.

Conventional QR Codes

• Provide up to four levels of error correction.
• Requires three finder patterns for orientation.
• Can encode up to 23,658 bits.

Enhance Your Barcode Capabilities with Barcode Xpress

Adding barcode recognition capabilities to an application can help to streamline document management workflows and allow organizations to route files more efficiently. Developers can easily integrate the ability to read and write barcodes into their platforms using a barcode SDK like Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress. With support for more than 30 unique barcode types, including Micro QR Barcodes, this versatile SDK provides the tools to support a wide range of use cases that call for fast, accurate barcode recognition.

For a hands-on evaluation of how Barcode Xpress will perform in your development environment, download a free trial today or start a conversation with one of our SDK specialists.

Docubee is a great no-code platform for automating your business processes. If you are a developer, we offer several ways to integrate Docubee directly into your site with straightforward APIs, and a few lines of code. If that isn’t your speed, no worries! You can learn more about how you can use Docubee code free here. Otherwise, read on!

You’ve got your perfect website and your customers know and love your unique style. With Docubee, it’s easy to use your own forms to collect data and much more. With additional effort, you could even send documents hosted on your site to Docubee and auto-populate them with data collected in a form.

To demonstrate a very simple use-case, here is a survey form in Docubee which can be used to collect and track response data. The Docubee workflow will be a very simple two step process – a web form and email step. Check out how to create a workflow template here.

The Docubee Workflow

Using Docubee’s fast form creator, it was easy to create a simple survey form.

Once created and published, the workflow’s form can be directly linked via URL for collecting survey data, or it can be submitted from your own site by initiating a POST request. This way you don’t need to worry about storing the data. Docubee allows you to track and export all responses.

Each field in the workflow designer has a Field Label and Property Name. The label is what shows up on the Docubee web form, and the Property Name is what the response data corresponds with in the Docubee dashboard.

So far, there are six “Single-Line Text” fields on the form, five of which have a data type of text and one of type e-mail.

(Label / Property Name)

• What is your favorite product? / Favorite_Product
• Why did your purchase this product? / Why_Purchase_Product
• How satisfied are you with this product? / Product_Satisfaction
• Would you recommend this product to a friend? / Recommend_Product
• Would you recommend this company to a friend? / Recommend_Company
• Your Email / Respondent_Email

The property name is also how the data is stored in the POST request body to Docubee that initiates the workflow.

The Docubee API

The workflow can be initiated from your site by having your form post to custom route on your server. The handler behind that route needs to format your forms response data to POST to the workflow instances API endpoint:

POST - https://docubee.app/api/v1/workflowInstances
Content-Type: application/json
Request Body
{
  "wfModelId": "yourModelIdHere",
  "wfData": {
    "Favorite_Product": "yourDataHere",
    "Why_Purchase_Product": "yourDataHere",
    "Product_Satisfaction": "yourDataHere",
    "Recommend_Product": "yourDataHere",
    "Recommend_Company": "yourDataHere",
    "Respondent_Email": "yourDataHere"
  }
}

Response
Content-Type: application/json
{
  "wfInstanceId": "instance-id",
  "redirectUrl": "url-if-there-is-a-next-workflow-step"
}

After a successful POST request, the workflow will be initiated with the data and a thank you email would be automatically sent to the email contained in the “Respondent_Email” property.

The survey responses can be tracked in the Docubee Dashboard under the “COMPLETED” instances tab.

All survey results can also be exported to a CSV file using the “Export Workflows” button.

Example CSV Export:

Docubee can be used for a wide variety of different use cases, from something as simple as collecting survey data, to more advanced use-cases requiring documents hosted on your site to be automatically populated with data.

Reach out today to schedule a demo, or to get started integrating Docubee’s other powerful APIs into your product. For more advanced use-cases our Professional Services team would be more than happy to assist.

Check out more here.

Landon Lamb, Software Engineer III – Docubee Team

Landon started out as a Software Engineer in Support at Accusoft in July 2016. In April of 2017, he transitioned onto the Docubee team initially as a Workflow Developer.

Currently, Landon is a Software Engineer III and works on the front end site, the back end services, and the product’s build pipeline. He enjoys helping deliver new features to Docubee’s growing user base.

Over the last few years, codemantra has focused on developing document processing capabilities to enhance its core document management systems. The multifaceted collectionPoint platform leverages the power of machine learning to extract data and integrate with business applications such as LMS solutions, ERP software, and CRM systems. However, in order to maximize collectionPoint’s document flexibility, codemantra needed the right integrations to manage and edit PDF documents. Rather than devoting additional development resources to building a viewing solution in-house, the codemantra team instead conducted a thorough review of multiple third-party integrations to find the ideal match for collectionPoint. Find out why they chose PrizmDoc^® for Java, formerly VirtualViewer^®.

Most software developers turn to third party integrations like Accusoft’s PrizmDoc to incorporate document processing capabilities into their applications. Since developers are frequently pressed for time and resources, it doesn’t make sense to build document lifecycle features from scratch when they can easily deploy a proven, scalable solution that provides all the tools they need. An API-based integration like PrizmDoc can quickly add industry-leading viewing, editing, collaboration, conversion, and assembly features to an application, which allows developers to focus on other features that will help their software stand out from competitors.

Pros and Cons of Server-Side Viewing

All that document processing power has to come from somewhere, and in the case of solutions like PrizmDoc, most processing is handled by a dedicated server. The server may be self-hosted on the developer’s local infrastructure, a dedicated private cloud, or a public cloud that’s shared by multiple customers.

There are plenty of advantages to this model. Scalable infrastructure is available for the heaviest document processing workloads, but customers only have to pay for the resources they actually use. A dedicated server also makes it easy for applications to manage document storage and avoid version confusion.

Server-side resources can also pose challenges for some applications. If the server is constantly being used to prepare and render documents for viewing, customers may find themselves utilizing more processing resources than expected. Scaling viewing capabilities for multiple users can increase resource usage because each session places additional processing requirements on the server, especially if users need to make annotations, redactions, or other alterations to files.

Viewing multiple, lengthy files server-side can also impact performance. PrizmDoc’s HTML5 viewer, for instance, converts and renders documents in SVG format. While this format offers outstanding quality and flexibility, load time may take longer and it also takes up server storage space.

Introducing PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing

The new PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing feature solves these challenges by offloading the processing work for viewing in PDF format to the end user’s device. This is a hybrid approach between server-side processing and client-side processing, with all of the viewing capabilities handled by the client-side device. This drastically reduces the server resources needed to prepare files for viewing, which translates into cost saving and improved performance. Since all viewing is handled by the browser on the client-side device, Hybrid Viewing offers much greater responsiveness for a better overall user experience.

For files not already in PDF format users can take advantage of the new viewing package which converts any file format to PDF. This not only allows documents to be viewed more quickly in the future, but also reduces server load and storage requirements.

5 Key Benefits of PrizmDoc Hybrid Viewing

The Hybrid Viewing feature works within PrizmDoc’s existing viewing package infrastructure, making it a simple and streamlined solution for both new and existing customers. Shifting viewing processing from the server to client-side devices provides applications with several important benefits.

1. Cost Savings

Transferring the processing work required for document viewing to an end user’s device reduces server workloads. Since customers pay for the server resources their applications utilize, minimizing server requirements for viewing can deliver significant cost savings over time.

2. Better Resource Management

All file types can be used with this new Hybrid Viewing feature. The new PDF viewing package pre-converts all file types into PDF only, rather than creating SVG files with large amounts of data. This saves both processing time and storage resources. Developers can take advantage of this flexibility and resource savings to implement additional application features that leverage PrizmDoc’s capabilities.

3. Increased Productivity

Shifting document viewing workloads to client-side devices allows applications to process, view, and manage multiple documents faster. This helps end users to do their jobs more efficiently and get greater value out of their applications.

4. Enhanced Performance

Hybrid viewing not only requires fewer resources, but files can be viewed and manipulated faster with enhanced responsiveness. For applications that need to provide editing features such as annotations, offloading processing to client-side devices minimizes load times and lag for a better overall user experience.

5. Scalable Document Viewing

By handling document viewing capabilities on local devices instead of the server, scaling capacity becomes far less resource intensive. File conversion only needs to be performed once, so adding more users doesn’t increase the overall server workload.

What Hybrid Viewing Means for PrizmDoc Users

The new Hybrid Viewing feature allows PrizmDoc users to get more out of their integration than ever before. For customers who have long relied on desktop-based PDF.js viewers due to concerns about server workload or performance, the Hybrid Viewing feature provides a localized viewing solution that streamlines their tech stack and leverages the full capabilities of PrizmDoc. By minimizing server requirements, developers can unlock the potential of their applications to scale their document lifecycle features without worrying of runaway costs.

Hybrid Viewing is available for PrizmDoc Server v13.15 or greater and can be used for self-hosted, private cloud-hosted, or public cloud-hosted deployments. To learn more about how it can provide the flexibility your application needs to scale with user demands, talk to one of our PrizmDoc specialists today.

Adding viewing and document conversion capabilities to an application can be a daunting task, especially when a development team is facing resource constraints and a tight schedule. That’s why many developers turn to API-based viewing integrations like Accusoft PrizmDoc Viewer instead of building those features from the ground up. By leveraging the versatile power of HTML5 viewing, they can quickly expand software capabilities without having to rethink the basic framework of their products.

What’s Under the Hood of PrizmDoc Viewer?

To understand how PrizmDoc Viewer goes about rendering documents in a web application, it’s helpful to take a closer look at its underlying architecture. There are two primary components that work in concert with the application’s web server: the HTML5 viewer and the backend.

The HTML5 viewer is integrated to run in the browser, typically via a web page or portal that serves as the front-facing aspect of the application. This is where document content is rendered as SVG elements. Since the viewer uses HTML5 to display content, it isn’t dependent upon any specific word processing software or imaging program.

Most of the heavy lifting is handled by the PrizmDoc Viewer backend, which consists of the PrizmDoc Server and PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS). PrizmDoc Server is the core computing component. It performs the actual conversion process to convert document pages to SVG, but it doesn’t have any permanent storage. Converted content and annotation markups are instead stored in PAS. The PAS component primarily handles long-term storage and hands files off to the server for conversion or processing. 

Critically, PAS also has privileged access to other storage locations used by the application, such as file systems or databases. This allows it to easily retrieve source documents and hand off tasks to the server.

The Role of the Web Application

The web application server sits between the HTML5 viewer component and the backend component. It functions as a reverse proxy that relays requests between the two, passing content requests from the viewer to the backend and then delivering converted SVG content from the backend to the viewer.

PrizmDoc Viewer doesn’t actually work with the source documents in the application’s storage. They remain safely unaltered while the backend generates a converted version for viewing and annotation. The web application typically only makes REST API calls to PAS. Background conversion that doesn’t involve the viewer, however, can be performed by making a direct call to PrizmDoc Server.

Making the HTML5 Magic Happen: Viewing a Document

When the web application has to open a stored document for viewing, each component of PrizmDoc Viewer plays a special role in the process. Everything begins with the web application sending a request to PAS to create a new viewing session. How this session is created depends upon how the backend is deployed. In most cases, it will be self-hosted as part of an on-premises deployment or through PrizmDoc Cloud services.

Once that session is created, PAS generates a new viewing session ID and passes it back to the application. All of this happens before any conversion or viewing begins, but the application can begin rendering to the HTML5 viewer by configuring it to use the viewing session ID. This brings up the viewing UI immediately, which will ultimately save time as the document is prepared.

The web application then uploads a copy of the source document to PAS, which can be in any number of formats supported by PrizmDoc Viewer. As soon as PAS receives the document, it begins handing off pages to PrizmDoc Server for conversion to SVG. Since pages are converted one at a time, PrizmDoc Viewer is able to open and view documents in the browser before the entire file is converted. That means less time is spent waiting around for large documents to be prepared for viewing.

As soon as the HTML5 viewer loads in the browser, it begins proxying requests to PAS through the web application for the first pages of content. Once the converted SVG content is available, PAS hands it back to the web application, which then passes it along to the HTML5 viewer, which displays that content in the browser. Additional pages are delivered as they’re ready, and the viewer may make subsequent requests as the user continues to interact with the document.

While the viewing process involves several steps, it is typically performed so quickly that the end user doesn’t experience any significant delays. Larger documents may take more time to render as SVG content, but even in these cases, PrizmDoc Server’s ability to render and deliver each page to the HTML5 viewer as it becomes available allows users to begin viewing documents within their browser right away.

Enhance Application Viewing Performance with PrizmDoc Viewer

As an API-based HTML5 viewing solution, PrizmDoc Viewer can be integrated into most web-based applications to support a broad range of file formats. Developers can use its annotation, redaction, document comparison, and conversion capabilities to deliver a full range of document management tools within their software platforms rather than having to build them from scratch.

To see how PrizmDoc Viewer will function in your application environment, sign up for a free evaluation trial. We provide ready-to-run Docker images in addition to installers for Windows and Linux. 

Accusoft’s ImageGear is a powerful image processing SDK integration that allows software developers to give their applications the ability to open, convert, and transform multiple image file formats. Given the complexity of image processing tasks, turning to a comprehensive SDK can save significant time and headaches in the software development cycle. Rather than building image manipulation features from scratch or seeking out multiple open source solutions for every processing need, developers can use ImageGear to add image processing essentials and whatever capabilities they need to keep their project on schedule.

8 Essential ImageGear Features

ImageGear delivers several noteworthy capabilities that are worth highlighting for developers looking to add image processing features to their applications. Here are a few of the most essential:

1. General Use Tools

Although ImageGear delivers a wide range of advanced image processing capabilities, it also provides a variety of conventional tools for image modification. Developers often incorporate these features into their application’s viewing interface, which allows users to easily alter images as needed. Some of the more commonly used tools include:

• Image cropping 
• Image rotation and resizing
• Thumbnail creation
• Sharpening/smoothing filters
• Contrast adjustment/gamma correction
• Red eye removal

2. Region of Interest Selection

Using ImageGear’s region of interest (ROI) features, it’s possible to create a freely shaped image area that can be targeted for additional processing. The ROI can be an ellipse or polygon shape, or it can be drawn freehand. Marking a specified area creates a 1-bit mask image to indicate which pixels will be affected by image processing algorithms.

3. Erosion/Dilation

ImageGear deploys mathematical morphology operations to help clean up and enhance binary images. Erosion works by removing layers of pixels from the inner and outer boundaries of defined regions in the foreground. This causes the white pixels in the foreground to shrink, which has the effect of making the area darker. Dilation performs the opposite function, increasing the boundaries of those same pixels to make the image region lighter. These functions are typically deployed in combination to remove objects or smooth borders on black and white or grayscale images.

4. Edge Detection

A key image processing capability, edge detection is used in pattern recognition, image matching, and 3D vision applications to identify the boundaries of objects within images. This function is particularly useful for image segmentation and data extraction tasks.

5. Speckle Removal

Speckling is the distinctive “salt and pepper” noise commonly found in many scanned or low resolution images. ImageGear has two different ways of removing speckles from an image to reduce noise and improve the overall quality without blurring details.

• Despeckle Method: Removes color noise from a 1-bit image by finding the average color value within the ROI and replacing the other pixels in the speckle area with this value.
• GeomDespeckle Method: Uses the Crimmins complementary hulling algorithm, which sends the image through a geometric filter that reduces speckle noise without compromising the edges of the original image.

6. ImageClean

The ImageClean function is a multi-faceted cleanup tool that uses several classes to perform common image processing tasks. Some of those tasks include:

• Inverting white text or auto-inverting black text on a white background.
• Auto-orientation or auto-cropping of an image.
• Cleaning borders.
• Dotted or solid line removal.
• Punch hold removal.

7. Background Correction

ImageGear can identify the best-fit plane for an image and then adjust the image luminance tilt accordingly, either by increasing or decreasing the image plane. This method is particularly effective at correcting illumination gradients in low-quality digitized images.

8. Image Effects

As part of its image processing capabilities, ImageGear provides a wide array of image effects that can be used to transform or modify image files. Developers can easily integrate these tools into their application’s viewer to allow end users to easily alter images. Some of these image effects include:

• Aging Effect: This effect adjusts image saturation and contrast to make an image appear worn and old. Noise and random vertical lines are also added to enhance the effect.
• Boost Effect: Often used to make older or faded images look new and more vibrant, this effect increases saturation, brightness, and contrast.
• Drop Shadow: This method adds a drop shadow to an image, which is often useful for setting an image apart from a background when combining visual elements.
• Gaussian Blur: Typically used to smooth out composited images, this effect blurs pixels to soften images and make them appear slightly (or extremely) out of focus.
• High Density Range Effect: This effect increases the contrast of shadow, highlight, and midtone areas separately, which mimics the human eye’s ability to adjust to lighting conditions rather than applying a uniform contrast adjustment.
• Lens Flare Effect: Commonly used to make images appear more dramatic or realistic, this method simulates a bright light reflecting within the camera lens.
• Solarize Effect: This effect sets a light threshold and then inverts the colors of any pixels that exceed that value. When applied to an image, it mimics the look of photographic film that was exposed to too much light during development.
• Toy Camera Effect: Often used to liven up an image, this effect emulates the distortions and imperfections created by using a low-quality camera lens in poor shooting conditions. 
• Sketch Effect: By blending the original image with a texture image, this effect can make the image look like it was sketched with a pencil or charcoal.
• Artistic Effects: This feature includes a series of effects that make images look as if they were hand painted. Two of these methods, the Pointillist and Splatter methods, use randomly generated pixel elements that cause the resulting image to be different each time the method is applied.

Expand Your Image Processing Capabilities with ImageGear

The features listed above only scratch the surface of ImageGear’s capabilities. In addition to essential image processing tools, the SDK also allows developers to add document features like annotation, conversion, compression, and full-page optical character recognition (OCR). With support for dozens of file formats, ImageGear gives software teams the tools they need to expand their application’s capabilities without wasting months of valuable development time. To get a first-hand look at what ImageGear can do for your .NET application, download a trial today.