The company was founded by Mohammed Daher and Rich Littlein the summer of 1990 as a partnership called Compression Technology and was later incorporated as LEAD Technologies, Inc. in April 1991. LEAD gained a worldwide presence in 1993 by signing its first international reseller agreement with Unirent LTD to represent LEAD in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Two years later, it signed a publishing agreement with Bunka Orient Corporation in Sendai, Japan for the rights to localize LEADTOOLS in Japanese, and to market and support the product in Japan.
Products
LEAD was established to commercialize Daher's inventions in the field of digital imaging and compression technology. The primary product, LEADTOOLS, is a family of raster, document, medical, multimedia and vector imaging toolkits that allow programmers and developers to incorporate digital imaging technologies into applications that they are creating. In addition to selling LEADTOOLS directly to software developers, LEAD Technologies, its divisions and subsidiaries use the SDK within several end user products including ePrint, MiPACS, M²Convert and FileWiggler. LeadTools eases the development of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine which is the universal format of picture archiving and communication system.
Optical Character Recognition, including document image cleanup.
3D reconstruction and 2D visualization of medical images.
Handwritten text recognition.
Medical Web Viewer Framework SDK for 2D and 3D visualizations.
Image processing functions.
Image scanning, import, display, and other basic image processing.
Interactive Annotation Objects.
Multimedia Engine.
Subsidiaries
In 2006, LEAD created M² Solutions, Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary. M² develops, markets and supports a product line called M² Convert, which helps end users convert from one multimedia format to another. M² has primarily focused on the mobile and handheld market for people using Apple iPods and iPads, and Microsoft Windows phones.
Divisions
In 2001, LEAD created a division called Medicor Imaging. Medicor develops, markets and supports a product line called MiPACS. Medicor’s primary product, MiPACS Dental Enterprise Solution is an application for large digital dental providers such as Universities, the United States Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs. When selected for use by the VA, the primary reason was that it was the only solution able to automatically acquire images from any device, view images with templates, and save images electronically to VistA imaging.
Patents
In July 1994, Daher was awarded patent #5327254, Method and Apparatus for Compressing and Decompressing Image Data. This invention became the foundation of LEAD's product line and business ventures. In early 2017, LEAD was awarded Patent #9552527. This patent describes a robust method for detecting the orientation angle of text in an image automatically without using OCR. It determines for each individual text area within an image whether it is written horizontally, vertically, or upright. This method enhances OCR accuracy, especially for Asian text which is often written vertically or a combination of vertical and horizontal text bodies. Detecting the correct angle of the text before doing OCR, improves the speed and performance of the OCR process. In mid-2019, LEAD was awarded Patent #10318563, Apparatus, Method, and Computer-Readable Medium for Recognition of a Digital Document. This patent is about using advanced computer vision to identify elements within images. Then, artificial intelligence uses the elements found to accurately determine a type of form. With this patented algorithm, filled-out form images can be distorted and vary in size and resolution without affecting performance. After recognition, AI techniques are employed to provide the precise location of each field of data. Having a precise location greatly improves the accuracy of OCR when processing the forms to extract data.
