Ettlingen, Germany. ARM-based Z series smart cameras from Vision Components are now available with user-friendly standard software for all machine vision applications: MVTec Software’s HALCON Embedded, featuring an integrated development environment and a comprehensive library of functions including blob analysis, morphology, matching, measuring, and identification has been successfully ported to the new camera models.
Users can comfortably develop applications on the PC and then export them to the Vision Components Smart Cameras, which run a Linux operating system. Available hardware options include a variety of sensors, processors, and interfaces.
The current version HALCON 12.0.1 enables significant speed increases and offers new features that facilitate application development. Optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities have been enhanced to ensure high recognition rates and reduce the need for parameter adjustments: the software is able to read characters of any size and distinguish text from the background even under challenging conditions, such as distorted characters.
Message queues for inter-thread communication were added, as well as a range of new operators for bead inspection. Additional software interfaces facilitate further processing of data. HALCON tuples or iconic variables can now be verified directly in Visual Studio. In HDevelop, vector variables can be processed, and tuples can be visualized as 1D or 2D plots from the variable window. In code-reading applications, potentially interfering edges outside the actual bar code are more effectively ignored. The recognition and processing of blurred or out of-focus images of EAN-13/UPC-A bar codes has been improved, and 2/5 interleaved codes are detected with a higher tolerance for print growth, print loss, and overexposure.
