Image acquisition interfaces, platforms as Linux or Windows or standards as FireWire or GigE: HALCON is highly flexible and can be combined with all important machine vision components within the market. Moreover, HALCON is already armed for future standards.
MVTec Software GmbH, Munich, Germany, expects its proven hardware independency to become an even more important market concept in the machine vision industry. It is the key for users to keep flexible when changing their hardware components. HALCON’s flexibility is unique within the machine vision industry:
- HALCON provides more than 40 ready-to-use interfaces to hundreds of frame grabbers and industrial cameras. New interfaces are developed regularly and existing ones continuously get updated and extended.
- No effort in the face of hardware modifications: The exchange of an image acquisition device requires only a minimal adaptation of the application.
- This all holds not only for Windows but also for Linux and Windows x64. Moreover, robotics-relevant platforms and DSPs are supported by HALCON: HALCON Embedded runs on many smart cameras from leading manufacturers (AnaLogic, Basler, eneo, Philips, Sony).
- HALCON's IDE (HDevelop) allows you to encapsulate machine vision programs in so-called external procedures, which also can be protected by passwords. These procedures can be reused on all platforms, thus, software development becomes easier and more flexible.
- HALCON supports the following standards: Universal TWAIN interface, universal DirectShow interface (also for Windows x64), universal IIDC 1394 camera interface (also for Linux and Windows x64).
- HALCON supports all transmission standards: Camera Link frame grabbers (from BitFlow, DALSA, Leutron, Matrox, Mikrotron, and many more), USB 2.0 cameras (e.g., from IDS or Lumenera), FireWire cameras (from Allied Vision, Basler, NET, Point Grey, Prosilica, Sony, Toshiba Teli, and others), GigE cameras (e.g., PicSight from Leutron, scout from Basler, TAG from Tattile, or TM-1405GE from JAI).
- Moreover, HALCON offers a special virtual frame grabber interface that simulates a frame grabber by reading out single images, image sequences, or AVI files from hard disk. For the test and development stadium of machine vision applications, this is an unbeatable feature.
- Easy and well-documented integration also for “exotic” image acquisition devices that HALCON does not support so far.
- Support of real-time preprocessing on suitable frame grabber (e.g., with Visual Applets from Silicon Software). Thus, more processing power is left for high-level image processing, which dramatically speeds up applications.
- All available image acquisition parameters can be queried including their type (integer, float, string, enumeration) and their minimum/maximum value or value list. With this, HALCON is already optimally armed for the future standard GenICam (“Generic Interface for Cameras”).
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