Speedup
With version 12, HALCON utilizes AVX2, thus running significantly faster on state-of-the-art processors. Further speedup is achieved in HDevelop and HDevEngine where the execution of procedures has become considerably faster by utilizing a just-in-time compiler.
3D vision
3D Vision
With the new local deformable surfaced-based matching, bent or stretched objects like pretzels can be found reliably, thus expanding the possibilities of 3D vision applications. Furthermore, HALCON's surfaced-based 3D matching in version 12 has become more robust when processing noisy image data, e.g., from time-of-flight cameras.
IDE
IDE
HALCON's highly interactive programming environment (IDE) HDevelop has been enhanced with support of parallel programming and thus allows concurrency. For this, HALCON 12 now also supports event-based processing. As a special key feature for software developers, a new extension allows to inspect HALCON variables (tuples and iconic) directly within Visual Studio, thus easing debugging tasks tremendously.
automatic text reader
Identification
HALCON 12 eases OCR applications with a new technology for automatic text reading. Characters of any size are found robustly, in most cases without the need to adjust parameters. The new technology has an impressive capability to distinguish characters from background texture even under challenging conditions, such as distorted characters.
easier 3d camera calibration
Usability
HALCON 12 contains many features for further improving the usability. One example is the camera calibration: By means of its new calibration plates, the improved camera calibration of HALCON 12 reaches the same accuracy by using considerably fewer images. Furthermore, it is no longer necessary that the new calibration plates are completely visible in the image.
Further New Features
Camera calibration for Scheimpflug optics
Hand-eye calibration for SCARA robots
Improved usability of sheet-of-light calibration
Support of vector variables
Visualization of tuples as 1D or 2D plots from variable window
Calculation of the pointwise distance of two contours
New operators for bead inspection
Support of digital I/O boards
Interfaces to PLC control systems using the OPC UA and OPC Classic standards
More robust recognition and reading of bar codes that are damaged or of poor quality
Reading bar codes with small module size is twice as robust
Assessment of direct mark quality of ECC 200 data codes, compliant with the SEMI T10-0701 standard
New operator to simplify triangulated 3D object models
Stereo reconstruction with multi-scanline optimization
More robust sample-based identification with respect to cluttered background and illumination changes
3D scene flow
Speedup of several operators
Improved interface for 3D visualization
Message queues for inter-thread communication
Speedup of subpixel operators
New HDevelop start dialog
And much more ...