LEAD Technologies

The company was founded by Mohammed Daher and Rich Little in 1990 as a partnership called Compression Technology, and in 1991 was incorporated as LEAD Technologies, Inc. LEAD was established to commercialize Daher's inventions in the field of digital imaging and compression technology.

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 Software Development Kit (SDK) within several end user products including ePrint, MiPACS, M²Convert and FileWiggler.

In 2001, LEAD created a division called Medicor Imaging. Medicor develops and supports the MiPACS product line. Its 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.

In 2006, LEAD created M² Solutions, Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary. M² develops and supports a product line called M² Convert, which helps end users convert from one multimedia format to another. M² focuses on the mobile and handheld market for people using Apple iPods and iPads, and Microsoft Windows phones.

In July 1994, Daher was awarded patent #5327254, Method and Apparatus for Compressing and Decompressing Image Data.

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 (i.e. W-2, W-4, 1090, etc). 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.