HALCON Progress - Version 21.05 available now

Version 21.05 of HALCON Progress delivers a variety of improvements and new features for your machine vision application. This version's latest features include:

Deep Optical Character Recognition improvements
Deep OCR is a holistic deep-learning-based approach for OCR. This new technology brings machine vision one step closer to human reading. Compared to existing algorithms, Deep OCR can localize characters much more robustly, regardless of their orientation, font type and polarity. The performance and usability of Deep OCR have been substantially improved in version 21.05. The handling of big images has been upgraded and the subsequent results now contain a list of character candidates with corresponding confidence values. This can be used to improve the recognition results.

Generic shape matching
HALCON 21.05 introduces Generic Shape Matching which makes MVTec's shape matching technologies more user-friendly and future-proof. In this version users can now implement their solution much faster as the number of required operators is significantly reduced.

HDevelop improvements
HDevelop's new window docking has been improved in HALCON 21.05. Users are now enabled with more options to control the position when floating windows are opened. Previously the top 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. Additionally a new feature called "Auto-hide" has been introduced, this feature allows users to quickly shrink widgets into the side bar when they don't need them and bring them back when necessary.

HALCON Deep Learning framework
HALCON 21.05 includes a first version of HALCON Deep Learning framework. This allows experienced users to create their own models within HALCON.

Subpixel barcode reader improvements
In HALCON 21.05 the subpixel barcode reader has been improved for low-resolved codes. The decoding rate for those can now increase up to 50%.

Improvements of basic operators in 2D and 3D for fast and robust preprocessing
In this version 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.