Accusoft Pegasus, the leading provider of imaging software development kits (SDKs), announces a new release of PICTools. Access the latest fully standards-compliant compression and decompression speed enhancements and the addition of a new standards-compliant file format support with this new PICTools release.

PICTools now takes advantage of major JPEG 2000 patent-pending, performance optimization, resulting in as much as 10-40% speed-up of compression and decompression. It also includes standards-compliant JPEG XR support and Lossless JPEG 64-bit speed optimizations for Windows and Linux, delivering a robust compression and decompression option for imaging application development.

“We’re very proud to offer our customers an enhanced product running at an increased speed – without sacrificing compatibility to standard JPEG 2000,” says Thomas Richter, Imaging Scientist. “This new release is the outcome of our years of experience in image coding research, especially in JPEG 2000.”

The PICTools JPEG 2000 technology features a user-configurable number of threads per operation for optimal throughput on multicore CPUs. This technology ensures the compression and decompression of the JPEG 2000 image data is compliant with the DICOM standard. The JPEG XR standard provides multiple features applicable to medical image storage and offers higher visual quality than JPEG at the same compression size. It has the capability to handle very large images, lossy and lossless compression in a single container type, a wide range of pixel formats and bit depths, and alpha channel support including compression settings independent of the image data compression settings.

Leading PACS, teleradiology, ultrasound, and cardiology applications rely on the PICTools Medical image compression libraries because they are the best and most advanced in the industry. The PICTools Medical SDK enhances still and video medical imaging applications across multiple environments. It contains high-performance C libraries providing the fastest compression and decompression engines and offers lossy and lossless DICOM-compliant formats, including 8-bit and 16-bit grayscale.

Integrate commercially supported software development libraries for a wide range of file formats, including HD Photo (JPEG XR), JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, and Camera RAW, with the PICTools Photo SDK. It includes the most powerful photo editing capabilities available and is designed to enrich photo management software, online photo services, kiosk applications, and other photo applications. Use PICTools Photo to perform advanced JPEG editing within compressed DCT space and avoid the generational loss and visual artifacts caused by decompressing and recompressing JPEG images.

PICTools technologies are supported across multiple environments including 32-bit/64-bit Windows, 32-bit/64-bit Solaris SPARC, 32-bit/64-bit Solaris x86, 32-bit/64-bit Linux, IBM AIX, and MAC OS X.

More information on Accusoft Pegasus imaging technology solutions can be found at www.accusoft.com. The PICTools product information, quick start guide and “getting started” sample, demos, and full-featured trial versions are available for immediate download at www.accusoft.com/pictools.htm.

Accusoft and Pegasus are registered trademarks and PICTools is a trademark of Pegasus Imaging Corporation (DBA Accusoft Pegasus) in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owner(s) in the United States and/or other countries..