newest features of halcon 23.05

The new HALCON 23.05 release comes in a Progress edition. With HALCON 23.05, MVTec raises existing machine vision technologies to a new level. With the new edition, MVTec is once again delivering on their promise to provide users with one of the world's most powerful and technologically advanced machine vision software solutions.

HALCON 23.05 was released on May 23, 2023.

What's new?

The synergy of classic machine vision and deep learning reaches a new level.

Deep Counting

With Deep Counting, a feature is available to customers as of HALCON 23.05 that can be used to count a large number of objects quickly and robustly as well as to detect their position. The deep-learning-based technology offers significant advantages over existing machine vision methods: The feature can be deployed very quickly, since only very few objects need to be labeled and trained – both steps can be easily done within HALCON. The technology provides reliable results even for objects of highly reflective and amorphous material. With Deep Counting large numbers of objects such as glass bottles, tree trunks, or food can be counted.

Training for Deep OCR – Detection

Deep OCR reads texts in a very robust way, even regardless of their orientation and font. For this purpose, the technology first detects the relevant text within the image and then reads it. With HALCON 23.05, it’s now also possible to fine-tune the text detection by retraining the pretrained network with application-specific images. This provides even more robust results and opens new application possibilities. For example: the detection of text with arbitrary printing type or unseen character types as well as an improved readability in noisy, low contrast environments.

Training for 3D Gripping Point Detection

3D Gripping Point Detection can be used to robustly detect surfaces on any object that is suitable for gripping with suction. In HALCON 23.05 there is now the possibility to retrain the pretrained model with own application-specific image data. The grippable surfaces are thus recognized even more robustly. The necessary labeling is done easily and efficiently via the MVTec Deep Learning Tool.

Easy Extensions Interface

With the help of HALCON extension packages the integration of external programming languages is possible. The advantage for customers: Functionalities that go beyond pure image processing can thus be covered by HALCON. In HALCON 23.05, the integration of external code has become much easier with the Easy Extensions Interface. This allows users to make their own functions written in .NET code usable in HDevelop and HDevEngine in just a few steps, while benefiting from the wide range of functionalities offered by the .NET framework. Even the data types and HALCON operators known from the HALCON/.NET language interface can be used. This increases both the flexibility and the application possibilities of HALCON.

Discover now our HALCON Leaflet

In our New-Features-Leaflet you will find all important information about our software HALCON. Discover MVTec HALCON and benefit from new features and short release cycles.

Read now

Learn about MVTec's previous HALCON Versions

We are continuously optimizing HALCON by releasing new versions approximately every six months.

HALCON 22.05

The version HALCON 22.05 seamlessly follows the previous releases: As usual, customers benefit from new features and useful enhancements of existing technologies: 

  • Global Context Anomaly Detection
    The "Global Context Anomaly Detection" technology available in HALCON 22.05 is a world first in its form. As an extension of the deep learning technology "anomaly detection", this feature opens up completely new application areas by allowing the detection of logical anomalies in images.
  • Individualized training for OCR applications
    Using HALCON’s Deep OCR, you can efficiently address OCR applications for a variety of application areas. With the individualized training for OCR applications, you'll improve results, enhance usability, and make applications even more robust.
  • Optimized print quality inspection of ECC200 codes
    With HALCON version 22.05, print quality inspection (PQI) of barcodes and data codes is now faster and even more robust.

HALCON 22.05 offers even more improvements – for example, a new operator that helps to optimize image contrast locally. Another new operator permits image smoothing with randomly shaped regions.

Read all detailed information about the improvements and features here. You will also find useful information in the technical documentation and in our Feature-Leaflet.

HALCON 20.11

HALCON 20.11 brings optimizations for a number of core technologies like surface-based and shape-based matching. With "DotCode", a new 2D code type has been added and with another new feature called "Deep OCR", MVTec introduces a holistic deep-learning-based approach for optical character recognition (OCR). 

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! With "deep learning edge extraction", HALCON 20.11 also brings a new and unique method to robustly extract edges. Especially for scenarios where a variety of edges is visible in an image, or when dealing with low contrast and high noise, deep learning edge extraction outperforms conventional edge extraction filters. 

Learn more about the features of HALCON 20.11 or  download the HALCON Steady version directly.

Curious about what's to come?

We will inform you in regularly about the news you can expect in HALCON.