MVTec HALCON is the comprehensive standard software for machine vision with an integrated development environment (HDevelop) that is used worldwide. It enables cost savings and improved time to market. HALCON’s flexible architecture facilitates rapid development of any kind of machine vision application.

MVTec HALCON provides outstanding performance and a comprehensive support of multi-core platforms, special instruction sets like AVX2 and NEON, as well as GPU acceleration. It serves all industries, with a library used in hundreds of thousands of installations in all areas of imaging like blob analysis, morphology, matching, measuring, and identification. The software provides the latest state-of-the-art machine vision technologies, such as comprehensive 3D vision and deep learning algorithms.

The software secures your investment by supporting a wide range of operating systems and providing interfaces to hundreds of industrial cameras and frame grabbers, in particular by supporting standards like GenICam, GigE Vision, and USB3 Vision. By default, MVTec HALCON runs on Arm®-based embedded vision platforms. It can also be ported to various target platforms. Thus, the software is ideally suited for the use within embedded and customized systems.

As a HALCON Progress user, you can experience a variety of improvements and new features that will make solving your machine vision task even easier. Do not forget to join one of our webinars presenting this new version to get more information or have a first look at this release's contents below:

• Deep OCR improvements
• Generic Shape Matching
• HDevelop usability improvements
• HALCON Deep Learning Framework
• Subpixel bar code reader improvements
• Improvements of basic operators in 2D and 3D for fast and robust preprocessing

With Deep OCR, HALCON includes a holistic deep-learning-based approach to OCR. Compared to other algorithms, this technology can localize characters much more robustly, regardless of their orientation, font type, and polarity. With HALCON 21.05, the performance and usability of Deep OCR have been improved. Big images are now handled more robustly and the result now contains a list of character candidates with corresponding confidence values, which can be used to further improve the recognition results. Customers also benefit from an overall improved stability as well as from the fact that they can address a wider range of possible applications, thanks to additional character support.

HALCON 21.05 introduces Generic Shape Matching, which makes MVTec's industry-proven shape matching technologies even more user-friendly and future proof. By significantly reducing the number of required operators, users can now implement their solution much faster and a lot easier. Moreover, thanks to the unification of HALCON’s different shape matching methods into a single set of operators, users can now integrate new shape-matching-related features more smoothly.

HDevelop’s new window docking has been improved. Users have now more options to control the position where floating windows are opened. Until now, the top left corner of the main screen has been used as the origin. Now it’s also possible to select the upper left corner of the screen where HDevelop is located, or the upper left corner of HDevelop itself.

In addition, HDevelop now also includes a new docking feature called "Auto-hide”. This allows users to quickly shrink widgets they currently don't need into the sidebar and easily bring them back when needed.

Finally, graphics windows can now be grouped and organized in a much more convenient manner, in the new Canvas window.

HALCON 21.05 introduces a first version of the HALCON Deep Learning Framework. This framework allows experienced users to create their own models within HALCON. With this feature, experts can now realize even the most demanding and highly complex applications in HALCON without having to rely on pretrained networks or third-party frameworks.

HALCON’s subpixel bar code reader is capable of reading codes with very thin bars. In HALCON 21.05, the subpixel bar code reader has been improved regarding low-resolved codes. The decoding rate for those can now increase up to 50%.

In HALCON 21.05, the 3D point cloud sampling now supports a new mode called “furthest point” which typically results in a more uniform sampling of a 3D object.

The 3D point cloud smoothing has been extended by a new mode that uses information from the XYZ-mappings. 3D point cloud smoothing can be used as a preprocessing step to smooth point clouds and remove noise. This mode usually leads to a much faster processing time.