Phaer

Speciale actie - 25% korting op upgrades en nieuwe development licenties

In past years, offering an incentive to customers to upgrade to the latest release has proven successful and will be repeated once more with the upcoming HALCON 12 release. Until December 12, 2014, you can benefit from the HALCON 12 promotional offer for all SDK upgrades to HALCON 12. Furthermore, you can also save 25% for new or additional HALCON 12 SDKs.

Halcon 12 spotlight - IDE (integrated development interface HDevelop)

HALCON’s integrated development environment (IDE), HDevelop, has been enhanced to support parallel programming and thus allows concurrency. Also, HALCON 12 supports event-based processing. As a special key feature for software developers, a new extension allows users to inspect HALCON variables (tuples and iconic) directly within Visual Studio, thus easing debugging tasks tremendously. Finally, vector variables are now supported in HDevelop and tuples can be illustrated as 1D or 2D plots from the variable window. 

 

Halcon 12 spotlight - 3D Vision

Enhancements in usability are one of the main challenges in the machine vision market today. In the newest version of HALCON, substantial improvements in usability have been realized. With its new and revised camera calibration, HALCON 12 reaches the same accuracy by using considerably fewer images or enhances the accuracy by using more images. Furthermore, it is no longer necessary that the new calibration plates are completely visible in the image, improving the usability enormously.  In addition, HALCON 12 offers camera calibration for “Scheimpflug optics” as well as hand-eye calibration for “SCARA robots”, and makes sheet-of-light calibration much easier. HALCON’s portfolio of 3D vision methods supports all aspects of 3D vision technology such as 3D reconstruction, 3D registration, and 3D object processing. HALCON 12 includes a new technique – local deformable surfaced-based matching. With this new feature, bent or stretched objects like bananas or other deformable objects 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 from Time-of-Flight cameras.

 

Halcon 12 spotlight -  Sample based identification

Sample-based identification recognizes trained objects based on characteristic features like color or texture. For some applications this eliminates the need to use special imprints like bar codes or data codes for object identification purposes. In HALCON 12, this technology is even more robust especially if different objects are trained with a different number of sample images.

 

Halcon 12 spotlight - Speedup

Software developers face a great challenge when requiring to speed up their application. HALCON supports users by actively exploiting multi-core processors, SSE2 and AVX, as well as GPU acceleration. With version 12, HALCON also supports AVX2, thus running significantly faster on state-of-the-art processors.  HDevEngine now executes HDevelop-Code significantly faster by using a so-called JIT (just-in-time) compiler that automatically compiles the HDevelop-Code to machine code internally. Further, the performance of selected operators has been improved significantly in HALCON 12, increasing their speed by up to 5 times.

 

Evaluation and Support Licenses 

 In the week before release, you will receive the first HALCON 12 evaluation and support licenses.

Important Changes

 Terminal Services: HALCON 12 now supports the use of USB Dongles in combination with Windows remote desktop connections.† Furthermore, starting with HALCON 12 the number of remote connections to a terminal server which can start HALCON processes is limited to one. However, it is still possible to start also multiple instances of HALCON locally.

Supported Platforms

 Under Linux, HALCON 12 no longer supports 32-bit systems and requires at least the compiler version gcc 4.2. 

Under Windows, HALCON 12 no longer supports Windows XP, Windows XP Embedded or Windows Server 2003. 

Under Mac OS X, version 10.7 is no longer supported.

Calibration Plates

HALCON 12 supports new easy to use calibration plates. In contrast to the old calibration plates, the new plates do not have to be completely visible in the calibration images. This especially simplifies multi-view calibration and the placement of the calibration plate near the image border. Furthermore, the new design contains a significantly larger number of calibration marks, which allows reliable calibration with fewer calibration images.

Please note, the new calibration plates are only supported by HALCON 12 and MERLIC, not by previous HALCON versions. For customers of previous HALCON versions, the old calibration plates are still available.

An updated price list for calibration plates is available - mail phaer@phaer.eu