HALCON is designed for optimal compatibility
Compatibility is an important key for protection of investment. The machine vision software in which you invest today must still be suitable tomorrow – wherever the advances in technology lead us and however the requirements of individual systems will change. In order to meet all needs, HALCON supports a great amount of image acquisition devices as well as a large variety of operating systems and programming languages.
HALCON works with various operating systems
HALCON is available for standard PCs running Windows (64-bit), Linux (64-bit), and macOS, as well as for Arm®-based platforms (32- and 64-bit) running the Linux operating system. This is not only true for the library, but also for HALCON's interactive programming environment HDevelop. See an overview of all supported operating systems. In addition, MVTec HALCON can also be ported to various hardware architectures, e.g., DSPs and special CPUs.
Full flexibility in the choice of image acquisition hardware
HALCON includes a powerful software interface to provide a common way to use different image acquisition devices, including line scan cameras, 3D cameras, and cameras with non-standard resolutions and more than 8 bits per pixel. A multitude of ready-to-use interfaces allow connecting easily to hundreds of industrial cameras and frame grabbers (analog, GenICam, GigE Vision, CoaXPress, USB3 Vision, USB, IIDC 1394, MIPI CSI, ...) HALCON supports all commonly used standards.
Because of its open interface, you can easily integrate additional image acquisition devices into HALCON. Moreover, you can pass images to HALCON via their memory address.
HALCON makes the most out of your hardware
HALCON supports a wide range of processor types – not only for PCs, but also for embedded systems. Moreover, HALCON also actively exploits the power of multi-processor and multi-core computers, instruction set extensions like NEON, SSE2, AVX2, and AVX512, as well as GPU acceleration.
With the generic AI Accelerator Interface (AI²), HALCON can also use supported AI accelerator hardware to speed up the inference part of deep learning applications. Such special devices are widely used especially for applications in the embedded environment, but also exist more and more in the PC environment. By abstracting the deep learning models from specific hardware, the AI Accelerator Interface is particularly future-proof. In addition to plug-ins provided by MVTec, the integration of customer-specific AI accelerator hardware is also possible. Moreover, it is not only typical deep learning applications that can be accelerated via AI². All "classic" machine vision methods with integrated deep learning functions, such as HALCON's Deep OCR, benefit from this as well.
Easy machine communication via digital I/O interfaces and devices
HALCON includes a software interface for digital I/O. Thus, you can use various I/O devices directly with HALCON. Furthermore, HALCON provides ready-to-use interfaces to all PLC control systems using the OPC UA and the OPC Classic standards. HALCON also supports fieldbus communication via the Hilscher-cifX interface. In this configuration HALCON communicates with the OPC UA servers at a client level and thus enables the agile production processes of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This significantly increases production efficiency (e.g., by predictive maintenance).
Windows: Digital I/O devices from Advantech, Contec, Interface, National Instruments, as well as all OPC UA and OPC Classic compliant digital I/O devices
Linux: The Linux GPIO character device as well as all OPC UA compliant digital I/O devices
macOS: All OPC UA compliant digital I/O devices
Communication via Real-Time Ethernet or fieldbus protocols can easily be implemented under Windows using Hilscher hardware.
HALCON speaks your programming language
The full HALCON library can be accessed from a wide range of programming languages like C, C++, Python, C#, and .NET. Read more about programming with HALCON.
Expand HALCON's functionality with extension packages
This unique feature allows you to integrate your existing or newly developed image processing algorithms into MVTec HALCON. Thus, you get a common view on all the image processing parts of your application and facilitate maintenance and future development. An open, extensively documented interface enables you to utilize the powerful internal data structures of HALCON.