The Halconist:  Your HALCON Imaging Software Support Byte                15.4

 

MVTec has released a new video entitled 'HDevelop Tutorial: GUI and Navigation'.  It provides a quick guide on navigating and utilising the HDevelop development environment included with HALCON.  The HDevelop interface is explained and tips are provided to help new and experienced users navigate around the environment with greater efficiency.  Registered HALCON users can download the corresponding example program to the video here
HALCON FEATURE: Improved Bar Code Reading with Halcon 12

MVTec continue the evolution of their bar code reading capabilties  impro ving the robustness under difficult conditions.

Certain images are know to caused issues, occasionally interfering with accurate location and reading of bar codes.  For example, edges that appear close to or aligned with the bar code result in the potential candidate region containing a lot of clutter. The algorithm cannot accurately recognise whether the edge of the paper is part of the code or not.  In HALCON 12 this is not problem, the bar code is quickly located and decoded.  Additionally, the search for candidate regions is now more robust in the presence of noise or distortions within a bar code... read more
HINTS AND TIPS: Measuring Thickness Profiles with Halcon

Have you ever tried to measure the thickness of a bead or the distance between two opposite 2D edges? Since the release of HALCON 12 this task has become much easier.  


The operator distance_contours_xld calculates the closest distance between 2 contours and assigns it as an attribute to each point of the first input contour (XLDFrom).

distance_contours_xld(XLDFrom,XLDTo,ContourOut, 'point_to_segment')


Suppose your inspection requirements command a certain minimum thickness.  You can extract all  segments below that minimum thickness with the operator:

segment_contour_attrib_xld (ContourOut, BadContours, 'distance', 'and', 0, DistanceMin)


You can also get the distance (thickness) profile through the operator:

get_contour_attrib_xld(ContourOut, 'distance', Distance)


By right-clicking the 'Distance' variable in the Variable View of HDevelop you can visualise it as a function plot. If you right-click into the plot, you can generate code to recreate it in HDevelop or even in your own application by exporting the generated code.


If you want to process the distance profile further, e.g. apply some smoothing or search for local maxima, HALCON's operators for 1D functions will come in handy (see chapter Tools/Function in the Reference Manual).
Like to learn more about HALCON 12 Imaging Processing Software? Our trained support team are here to help. 
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