General Features
Identification and Classification
- HALCON now provides an automatic text reader that is able to segment and read characters of any size robustly without the need for extensive parameter tuning.
- The MLP-based classifiers (for general classification and for OCR) now provide a mechanism to regularize the weights of the MLP to enforce smoother transitions of the confidences between classes and to prevent overfitting.
- The MLP-based classifiers (for general classification and for OCR) now provide a mechanism to automatically generate a rejection class.
- The MLP-based classifiers (for general classification and for OCR) now provide a mechanism automatically determine the regularization parameters.
- HALCON has been extended with the pretrained OCR fonts ‘Document’ and ‘Industrial’ with regularized weights and a rejection class.
- HALCON now provides improved robustness of the sample-based identification.
- HALCON now provides improved robustness of the bar code reader.
- HALCON now enables to assess the direct part mark quality of an ECC 200 data code, compliant with the SEMI T10-0701 standard.
Camera Calibration
- HALCON now supports new easy to use calibration plates.
- HALCON now provides a camera model for tilt lenses (also called Scheimpflug optics) both for regular lenses and for bilaterally telecentric lenses.
Hand-Eye Calibration
- HALCON now supports the calibration of SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm) robots.
Sheet of Light
- HALCON now provides operators to support sheet-of-light calibration with a 3D calibration object.
Surface-Based 3D Matching
- HALCON now provides a deformable surface-based 3D matching that finds objects and determines their poses and deformation in 2.5D as well as in 3D data.
- Surface-based matching is now more robust when matching in noisy data, such as data from time-of-flight cameras.
3D Vision
- HALCON now provides a new operator to simplify a triangulated 3D object model by removing less important points.
- HALCON now provides a new interface for the visualization of 3D object models.
I/O Devices
- HALCON now provides a generic interface for accessing I/O devices.
- HALCON has been extended with an I/O interface for OPC UA that allows reading and writing data to and from OPC UA servers and with an I/O interface for OPC Classic that allows reading and writing data to and from OPC Classic servers. The interfaces allow to communicate with virtually every PLC.
- HALCON has been extended with four ready-to-use I/O interfaces for I/O boards of Advantech, Contec, Interface, and National Instruments that allow the easy controlling of digital input and digital output devices.
Speedup
- HALCON now exploits the AVX2 instruction set under Windows and Linux. This leads to a significant speedup on machines that support the AVX2 instruction set.
- Various HALCON operators have been speeded up.
Further Enhancements
- HALCON now provides an operator to compute the pointwise distance of contours.
- HALCON now provides operators to measure and inspect adhesive beads.
- HALCON now provides operators for binocular stereo that solve the stereo correspondence using multi-scanline optimization.
- HALCON now provides operators to calculate the scene flow (a representation of the 3D motion of points in a scene) of two consecutive stereo image pairs.
- HALCON now provides operators for inter-thread communication
- HALCON now provides event-based interaction with drawing objects.
- The new binary file format HOBJ supports all kinds of iconic HALCON objects, i.e., images, regions, and XLDs.
- Several operators have been revised to be reentrant.
IDE
- HDevelop now supports vector variables, i.e., containers that may contain multiple tuples, multiple iconic objects, or multiple vectors.
- HDevelop now allows to execute several operators and procedures in parallel.
- HDevelop now provides a new inspection window to graphically visualize functions and numeric tuples as 1D or 2D plots.
- HDevelop now provides a Start dialog.
- HDevelop has been given a new look.
- HALCON now provides an extension for Visual Studio that allows to inspect the contents of HALCON variables directly in the debug mode of Visual Studio.
Language Interfaces
- HDevEngine and HDevelop now provide a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that – depending on the code structure – may significantly accelerate the runtime of HDevelop procedures.