Home

Getting Started with HALCON

Contents

1. dol Pulini Licenses pi ih DD 2 3 3 Installing the License File 6 ese view ian 2 3 4 Using Floating Licenses 0 200048 2 3 3 VSR iii ii Configuration 2 ck ee eee ewe DED OED RED SES 2 4 1 Windows NT 2000 XP LL oe UNIA eek hee ee ee eee ee ee ee ee eB Integrating a HALCON Extension Package 4 2 5 1 Installing an Extension Package 004 2 5 2 Using an Extension Package Within HDevelop 2 5 3 Using an Extension Package in a Stand Alone Application A First Look at HDevelop 31l da The Graphical User Interface of HDevelop LL 3AA Maii Window pila E A na 3 1 2 Program Window LL 3 1 3 Operator Window aooaa 3 1 4 Variable Window LL 3 1 5 Graphics Window a aoaaa Editing a HDevelop Program LL ZI Vi Vi m 10 11 12 12 14 15 16 16 17 18 18 20 21 23 26 28 28 29 ol 31 32 32 eo Lodato ano illa a anal 3 4 Modifying the Graphics Window LL 3 5 Creating a Region of Interest ROI aooaa 3 6 Finding the Right Operator 0 0 000 eee eens 3 7 Finding the Right Parameter Values 2 0 00040 3 8 Finding the Board as ROL i ne i ew ewe eee ee ee 3 9 Finding Bonding Balls Using Morphology 3 10 Working with Control Variables 0 2 2 0 0 000 eee 3 11 Finding Bonding Balls Using Pattern Matching 3 12 Using C
2. 60 70 close_framegrabber 60 69 closing circle 59 color image 2 57 COM 1 3 56 export of HDevelop programs 3 combine_roads_xld 68 concat_ocr_trainf 68 connection 48 contours 59 control data 56 count_obj 49 CPU ID 18 19 troubleshooting 77 create_template 51 data types 81 control data 56 floating point numbers 56 iconic data 56 images 57 integers 56 regions 57 strings 56 63 tuples 2 56 57 63 XLDs 59 debugging 1 3 38 Delphi Borland 3 56 demo version HALCON 9 dev_open_window 41 dev_set_paint 41 dev_set_part 41 DIGITAL UNIX 4 33 dilation 59 directories bin 13 28 30 78 calib 13 doc 13 28 30 examples 13 filter 14 FLEX1m 13 19 24 25 27 29 help 28 30 images 14 28 30 include 14 lib 14 29 30 license 14 21 28 30 lut 14 ocr 14 disp_circle 50 disp_image 68 DISPLAY 31 domain area of definition 2 57 dongle 18 20 21 26 device driver 17 installation 11 26 27 uninstallation 16 27 parallel port 26 troubleshooting 77 82 USB 26 27 draw_circle 67 draw_rectangle1 42 43 49 51 draw_region 43 edges_sub_pix 60 environment variables 29 ARCHITECTURE 28 30 DISPLAY dl HALCONEXTENSIONS 29 31 32 HALCONIMAGES 28 30 HALCONROOT 28 29 HALCONSPY 29 31 72 HOME 31 LD_LIBRARY_PATH 30 32 33 PATH 29 30 erosion 59 example HDevelop 35 extension package HALCON 4 29 31 56 installation 31
3. All other modules make use of it to process image operations and to obtain information about the configuration and current state of the system The knowledge base is also used to automatically generate the HALCON language interfaces for C C and COM all operator information used by HDevelop the online help and the reference manuals The operator knowledge base contains information about names and number of operators as well as parameter types assertions and suggested values for the parameters This data set is stored in a structured way There exists a detailed description for each operator which handles the effects of the operator and which indicates the complexity the operator class as well as cross references and alternatives On top of these two modules the operators are implemented Most of them are contained in the HALCONImage Processing Library operator library which is decribed in the Reference Manuals This library can be extended dynamically using so called extension packages The operators of these packages behave like normal HALCON operators but they contain exten sions to the standard library either generated by MVTec for easy update or by the user This concept permits the user to extend the system in a very flexible way For more information see the Extension Package Programmer s Manual Using a similar mechanism frame grabber interfaces are integrated using dynamic libraries This allows the user to integrate his he
4. How to use the HALCON library in your C programs HALCON C User s Manual How to use the HALCON library in your C programs HALCON COM User s Manual How to use the HALCON library in your COM programs e g in Visual Basic Extension Package Programmer s Manual How to extend the HALCON system with your own operators Frame Grabber Integration Programmer s Manual A guide on how to integrate a new frame grabber in the HALCON system HALCON HDevelop HALCON C HALCON C HALCON COM The reference manuals for all HALCON operators versions for HDevelop C C and COM Application Guide Multiple independent documents called Application Notes written from the point of view of developing machine vision applications with HALCON Each Note covers a specific topic e g how to use shape based matching to find and localize objects All these manuals are available as PDF documents The reference manuals are available as HTML documents as well For the latest version of the manuals please check http www mvtec com halcon HALCON 6 1 4 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Chapter 2 Installation Licensing Configuration Before describing how to install and configure HALCON let s take a look at the different HALCON versions and licensing schemes You can obtain HALCON n three versions b The demo version is basically a version of HDevelop with the full image processin
5. e Ifthe package name is system Inconsistent version of HALCONROOT help or wrong HALCONROOT e If the package name is that of a user package Inconsistent version of the help files of this package Can t open display If you see an error message like this you may have a wrong system variable DISPLAY and or your program is not allowed to open a window by the specified X server 6 5 5 Troubleshooting for Parallel HALCON Parallel HALCON does not achieve any speedup If Parallel HALCON does not achieve any speedup on a multi processor hardware maybe Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 6 5 TROUBLESHOOTING 79 you forgot to initialize Parallel HALCON as described in section 5 1 1 You must ini tialize Parallel HALCON once on each parallel hardware it 1s to be used on With this initialization Parallel HALCON scans the hardware and checks its potential for parallel processing If you already initialized Parallel HALCON you can check whether Parallel HALCON really found the processors by calling the operator get_system with the parameter processor_num see the corresponding entry in the Reference Manual for more in formation Please note that this operator must be called from Parallel HALCON to yield meaningful results from standard HALCON it returns 1 regardless of the actual number of processors Please remember that Parallel HALCON only works on shared memory systems e A Parallel HALCON program runs
6. 04 6 3 Online Help in HDevelop os iw eb he ea ee e e he ee 6 4 Monitoring HALCON Programs with HALCON Spy 6 5 Troubleshooting 42 64468828 HER e Rae Ee ee ew 6 5 1 Problems During Installation 0 6 5 2 Problems During Uninstallation 6 5 3 Problems Concerning Licenses 2 0 00048 6 5 4 Troubleshooting in HDevelop 0 4 6 5 5 Troubleshooting for Parallel HALCON SI 55 56 57 di 57 59 60 6l 6l 62 63 63 65 65 66 66 67 67 68 69 69 69 70 70 Index 6 5 6 Miscellaneous Problems Chapter 1 Introducing HALCON Congratulations With HALCON you have chosen a sophisticated image analysis package de signed for product development research and education HALCON provides a unique library with about 1000 operators covering a wide range of image analysis tasks data visualization and a comfortable debugging mechanism HALCON operators can be used within C and C programs on Windows NT 2000 XP and many UNIX platforms In addition under Windows NT 2000 XP HALCON has a COM interface This allows you to use HALCON operators from Visual Basic for example Furthermore it is very easy to integrate your own specific operators into the system The HALCON data structures for iconic data provide a very convenient handling of images re gions and contours Optimized algorithms allow high performance even on standard ha
7. 3 Send the ID in this example the string 0003 C1DE 01C3 E79F to your local distributor together with the hostname of this machine in your network for example halconserver If lmhostid returns the reason probably is that the service providing the CPU ID is disabled in the computer s BIOS You can check and enable this service in the BIOS configuration mode this mode can only be entered during the booting process Please consult section 6 5 3 1 for troubleshooting To check the dongle ID Windows NT 2000 XP only type 1mhostid flexid The output now might look like this gt lmhostid flexid lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEXlm host ID of this machine is FLEXID 7 36c79bd7 Note that this number is also written on the dongle 2 3 2 Runtime Licenses and HALCON Modules HALCON operators are grouped into so called modules Some modules e g Basic Operators or Image Region XLD Management are used in all HALCON applications others like Background Estimation or 1D Bar Code Reader will only be needed in special applications While the development version of HALCON automatically includes all modules you can limit a runtime version to the modules you actually need You can check which modules are used by an application in two ways 1 If the application is running in HDevelop see chapter 3 for more information select the menu item File gt Modules which will op
8. 3 2 3 3 in the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting HDevelop the first time 2 5 3 Using an Extension Package in a Stand Alone Application If you want to generate a stand alone application using the package you have to link package libraries DLLs under Windows shared libraries under UNIX to the application code besides the standard HALCON library of course 2 5 3 1 Using an Extension Package Under Windows NT 2000 XP In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link packagec lib or packagecpp lib to your objects Furthermore you will need halconc lib or halconcpp lib as for any HALCON application To be able to link the package DLL to your application program the complete DLL file path of the new package e g HALCONROOT packages halconuser bin i586 nt4 has to be added to the environment variable PATH Do not copy a package DLL into the Windows system directories as it would be loaded twice in this case Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 5 INTEGRATING A HALCON EXTENSION PACKAGE 33 2 5 3 2 Using an Extension Package Under Linux In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link libpackage so and libpackagec so or libpackagecpp so to your objects besides libhalcon so and libhalconc so or libhalconcpp so as for any HALCON application Furthermore you have to add the package library subdirectory 1ib i586 linux2 2 or lib i58
9. Extension Package Interface 4 external trigger 61 fast_match 2 SI fast_match_mg 51 fill_up_shape 47 for 54 frame grabber 3 60 asynchronous grabbing 61 external trigger 61 Parallel HALCON 69 synchronous grabbing 61 volatile grabbing 62 frame grabber interface 56 60 fread_string 68 full version HALCON 9 fwrite_string 68 gauss_image 45 gen_imagel_extern 4 63 gen_rectanglel 42 43 get_framegrabber_lut 60 get_framegrabber_param 60 get_modules 21 get_system 79 give_bg_esti 68 grab_image 3 60 62 grab_image_async 60 62 grab_image_start 60 61 Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Index graphics window HDevelop 36 39 41 45 gray values 57 HALCON configuration 28 demo version 9 development license 21 23 directories bin 13 28 30 78 calib 13 doc 13 28 30 examples 13 filter 14 FLEX1m 13 19 24 25 27 29 help 28 30 images 14 28 30 include 14 lib 14 29 30 license 14 21 28 30 lut 14 ocr 14 evaluation license 9 extension package 4 29 31 56 installation 31 Parallel HALCON 70 file structure 12 floating license 9 12 21 23 26 frame grabber interfaces 56 60 full development version 9 installation 10 troubleshooting 73 language interfaces 56 HALCON C 56 HALCON C 56 HALCON COM 56 license file 18 21 23 28 30 license key 22 license manager daemon 11 23 license server 11 12 23 license troubleshooting C
10. Index coordinates 63 image matrices in memory 63 image size 63 length of strings 63 objects per parameter 63 polygon control points 63 lines_gauss 60 Linux 4 5 33 lmhostid 19 main window HDevelop 36 menus 37 Edit 37 Execute 37 File 37 Help 37 Operators 37 Suggestions 37 44 Visualization 37 Window 37 tool bar 37 Activate 38 Copy 38 Cut 38 Deactivate 38 Feature histogram 38 Gray value histogram 38 Gray value inspection 38 New 38 Open 38 Paste 38 Region inspection 38 Reset 38 Run 38 Save 38 Set parameters 38 Step 38 Stop 38 Zooming 38 matching pattern matching 2 shape based matching 2 mean_image 43 45 median_image 57 memory management 3 55 monochrome image 57 multi channel image 2 multisensor image 57 network card 18 19 21 23 Index troubleshooting 76 77 online help HDevelop 44 56 alternatives 71 cross references 72 debugging 72 keywords 71 predecessors 71 references 71 successors 71 open_framegrabber 3 60 61 69 open_window 67 68 opening_circle 47 53 operating systems 4 operator knowledge base 1 44 55 71 operator library 1 56 extension 4 operator window HDevelop 36 38 40 text field 39 41 44 Parallel HALCON 5 extension package 70 frame grabber 69 HALCON Spy 70 initialization 66 programming 67 switch off 69 troubleshooting 78 parallel programming 4 5 67 PATH 29 30 pattern matching 2 p
11. Run together with the Windows Explorer In the latter open the directory bin i586 nt4 of the root directory of your Activ VisionTools installation Now type regsvr32 u the dialog Run and then drag and drop ActivVTools ocx from the Explorer into the dialog where it automatically appears with the full path To execute the command click OK Then replace the OCX with the new open type regsvr32 in the dialog Run drag and drop ActivVTools ocx from the Explorer into the dialog and again click OK If you decided to switch back to an older HALCON version as described in section 2 1 5 you must of course unregister the new OCX and register the old one if you deleted it you can recover it from the corresponding directory on the ActivVisionTools 2 0 CD e ActivVisionTools 1 0 1 3 In contrast to ActivVisionTools 2 0 ActivVisionTools 1 0 to 1 3 cannot be used together with HALCON 6 1 x i e there is no compatible OCX available If the setup program HALCON 6 1 4 16 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION of HALCON 6 1 x detects such an ActivVisionTools version e g ActivVisionTools 1 3 it therefore only warns that by continuing you will disable your ActivVisionTools instal lation If you still want to use your ActivVisionTools installation you must also keep your old HALCON 6 0 x installation and switch back to it as described in section 2 1 5 Note that if you only want to evaluate HALCON 6 1 x you can minimize the switching
12. To put it in a nutshell standard HALCON is optimized for running sequential programs on single processor boards Under Windows NT 2000 XP Linux and Solaris HALCON is thread safe 1 e it can be used in multi threaded programs However all HALCON operators are executed exclusively thus threads will have to wait for each other In contrast Parallel HALCON supports parallel programming e g multi threaded programs by being thread safe and reentrant This means that multiple threads can call a HALCON operator simultaneously Parallel HALCON is available for Windows NT 2000 XP Linux and Solaris Besides supporting parallel programming Parallel HALCON automatically parallelizes opera tors if started on multi processor hardware e g a dual pentium board This mechanism is fully compatible to older HALCON versions 1 e old HDevelop C or C programs do not need to be changed The parallelization mechanism is based on distributing the data which has to be processed 1 e the images on multiple threads that run on different processors so called data parallelism For example for a filtering operation on a four processor board the image will be split into four parts which will then be processed in parallel by four threads executing the same filtering operator Together with HALCON s philosophy for treating images and regions this form of parallelization is very efficient because images need not to be copied Note that s
13. background estimation e g update_bg_esti give_bg_esti As this thread behavior is not recommended quite generally Parallel HALCON does not actively prevent it and thus saves overhead This means that if you accidentally call such operators simultaneously with the same data no thread will block but you might get unwelcome effects 4 mutual exclusive Some operators cannot be called simultaneously by multiple threads but may be exe cuted in parallel to other HALCON operators Examples for mutual exclusive operators are combine_roads_xld pouring or concat_ocr_trainf 5 completely exclusive A group of operators is executed exclusively by Parallel HALCON 1 e while such an operator is executed all other threads cannot call another HALCON operator Examples are all OCR OCV operators that modify OCR classificators all operators that create or delete files and the operator reset_obj_db For the latter a programmer has to assure that all operators that are to be executed before reset_obj_db is called have already finished because this operator resets HALCON and therefore strongly influences its behavior As mentioned already the description of a HALCON operator in the Reference Manuals con tains an entry called Parallelization Information which specifies its behavior when using Par allel HALCON This entry specifies the level of reentrancy as described above 5 2 2 Style Guide e Initialization Before calling HALCON
14. cannot re member the operator s name you have the possibility to obtain an operator by specifying one or more keywords 71 72 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS e Online help on operators HALCON offers a detailed online help for each HDevelop operator These manual pages are highly structured thus allowing you to easily get an understanding of an operator Moreover cross references immediately give you a survey of the operator s relations To use this help you only need a standard HTML browser e Debugging help You may choose between different modes of running a program You have the possibilities to perform single steps of a program to set breakpoints or to run a program continuously To get meaningful debugging support you may also specify the environment variable HALCONSPY see section 2 4 2 e Result visualization HDevelop offers the immediate inspection of an operator s results This visualization mechanism helps you to spot problems quickly Additionally it is very easy for you to modify graphics output parameters to optimize your graphics results 6 4 Monitoring HALCON Programs with HALCON Spy HALCON Spy helps you to debug image processing programs realized with HALCON oper ators by monitoring calls to HALCON operators and displaying their input and output data in graphical or textual form Furthermore it allows you to step through HALCON programs HALCON Spy is activated within a HALCON program by inserting the line i
15. effort by installing only the demo version In this case there is no need to re register the HALCON COM interface library halconx d11 2 2 Uninstallation 2 2 1 Uninstalling HALCON Under Windows NT 2000 XP There are multiple ways to uninstall HALCON please note that not all are available for older versions of HALCON 1 In the system control panel choose Add Remove Programs 2 If the HALCON release you want to uninstall is newer than version 5 1 Select Start gt Programs gt MVTec HALCON gt Uninstall HALCON 3 From version 5 2 on the HALCON setup program checks whether there is an old version of HALCON and allows you to uninstall it This is the preferred way since it avoids the problem with the path variable described below Note however that this method does not work if you want to uninstall an older maintenance release based on the same version of HALCON Typically this is all you have to do If you encounter any problems please refer to section 6 5 2 Note that the uninstallation removes exactly those files which were installed This has two im plications If you added files after the installation e g new frame grabber interfaces extension packages images or manuals these files and the corresponding directories will survive the uninstallation On the other hand if you only modified a file e g an example without chang ing its name the uninstallation will remove it nevertheless you might therefore want
16. file HALCON 6 0 WHERE BEER MVTec Software GmbH ID 00e02958e3b6 TREAT FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 uncounted 9C6D4634F08A932DBC2D VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 82 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 uncounted TCADE63412EF3451B596 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 34 upgrade license file HALCON 6 0 to HALCON 6 1 THERE SEE EES EE EEE MVTec Software GmbH ID 00e02958e3b6 VIRA ET ETE ES EE EE EE HH UPGRADE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted 3C0D76C4ADF2BFE51017 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 54 UPGRADE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted 1CCDC6246E6E497BBOB4 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 48 resulting license file after appending the upgrade keys VER AMARE ROB ERE AREE RE MVTec Software GmbH ID 00e02958e3b6 VERRA RARE ARONA LEE RE FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 uncounted 9C6D4634F08A932DBC2D VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 82 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 uncounted TCADE63412EF3451B596 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 34 UPGRADE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted 3C0D76C4ADF2BFE51017 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 54 UPGRADE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted 1CCDC6246E6E497BB0B4 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 48 Figure 2 5 Upgrading a license from HALCON 6 0 to HALCON 6 1 Fi
17. g if the setup of HALCON 6 1 1 detects HALCON 6 1 the setup enables you to replace the in stalled components by those of the new release If you are using floating licenses please note the following After installing HALCON 6 1 2 on the computer acting as the Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 1 INSTALLATION 11 license server you must restart the license manager daemon this also applies if you update from HALCON 6 1 or 6 1 1 to HALCON 6 1 3 See section 2 3 4 3 for detailed information e other version If the setup detects a release of another HALCON version e g if the setup of HALCON 6 1 1 detects HALCON 6 0 3 it asks whether you want to keep the old version For more information about switching between multiple HALCON versions please refer to section 2 1 5 The setup program also checks whether you have installed ActivVisionTools and whether the installed version 1s compatible to the current HALCON version Please refer to section 2 1 6 for more information After all these checks the installation wizard allows to specify whether you would like to in stall e the full HALCON version Compact Custom Typical e the runtime version only Runtime or e just the demo version hdevelop_demo exe Demo Note that you can install additional parts of HALCON at a later time by inserting the CD again and selecting the parts you need After this selection the setup program asks whether to install the driver pr
18. gram reg_halconx via the button Browse append the option u and then click OK e Uninstallation of the license manager daemon As mentioned in section 2 2 1 if you uninstall a HALCON 5 0 or 5 1 version with floating licenses the FLEXIm license manager daemon occasionally is not uninstalled properly How to uninstall the license manager daemon manually is described in section 2 3 4 1 HALCON 6 1 4 74 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS Internal Error If the uninstall process is terminates with a message like Internal Error unable to load or call external DLL Please contact your distributor for more information the most likely reason is that a new HALCON version was installed over an existing one without completely removing the old files first Other possible reasons might be that the whole HALCON directory was moved to an other position on the hard disk or the environment variable XHALCONROOT was changed manually You have to follow the following steps to recover from the error l Check if the environment variable XHALCONROOT matches the location of your HALCON directory You can check this via the system control panel System look for Environment or in a Windows Command Prompt via echo HALCONROOT If the variable contains nothing or the files are in some other location you have to set HALCONROOT manually via the System control panel 2 Check if these following files directories are present e In the directo
19. in the following processing steps By re stricting the image domain the performance can be increased significantly because all following HALCON 6 1 4 42 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP Image processing tasks will be performed only within this ROI and not on the whole image Figure 3 4 A rectangular and an arbitrary region of interest ROI To generate a ROI you have the following possibilities e Interactive creation of a rectangular ROI Select the operator draw_rectangle1 from the menu Operators gt Graphics gt Drawing to draw a rectangle in the graphics window Just execute the operator with the default names for the output variables containing the pixel coordinates of the upper left and lower right corner of the rectangle This creates a new line in the program window and HDevelop waits for you to draw the rectangle like you did before while setting an image part to zoom in After you finished the drawing the four control output variables Row1 Columni Row2 and Column2 will appear in the variable window see figure 3 5 To gen erate the corresponding ROI as an HALCON object use the operator gen_rectangle1 from the menu Operator gt Regions gt Creation with the variables Row1 Column2 as input parameters You might use ROI as the name for the resulting output object draw_rectanglei WindowID Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 gen_rectanglel ROI Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 By executing this operato
20. its start and end point is stored Both the start point and the end point belong to the region This allows a very compact representation of regions in memory and an efficient region processing especially with morpholgic operations Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 4 2 HANDLING ICONIC AND CONTROL DATA 59 Regions may be of any size and therefore even may exceed the image size This is an ad ditional advantage since it prevents artifacts For example imagine you want to close a region with a circular structuring element to smooth the region s boundaries and to close holes within the region e g via the operator closing circle You use this to extract a little fin see figure 4 4 or cf the HDevelop program example fin2 dev under the path AHALCONROOT examples hdevelop Applications FA The closing is done by a dilation followed by an erosion both with the same circular structuring element in our case a circle of radius 250 you may think that 250 is rather large but with the advanced performance of HAL CON this causes no performance problem Now imagine that the maximum region size would be restricted to the image size Thus after processing the first step the dilation the resulting region has to be clipped to the image size see figure 4 4 a The following erosion would work on a restricted area and therefore result in a much smaller area than the correct processing see figure 4 4 b This would make the correct extr
21. matrix 57 63 color 2 57 domain area of definition 2 57 file 40 file format binary 4 BMP 4 Gif 4 JPEG 4 PCX 4 PNG 4 PNM 4 Sun Raster 4 Tiff 4 XWD 4 monochrome 57 multi channel 2 multisensor 57 region of interest ROI 2 41 46 57 sequence 11 size 63 image acquisition asynchronous 61 HALCON 6 1 4 84 external trigger 61 synchronous 61 volatile grabbing 62 info_framegrabber 60 69 insertion cursor HDevelop 38 39 installation dongle device driver 11 26 27 HALCON 10 troubleshooting 73 update 12 HALCON extension package 31 license manager daemon 11 24 25 troubleshooting 73 IRIX 4 33 junctions_skeleton 45 keywords 44 language interfaces 56 HALCON C 56 HALCON C 56 HALCON COM 56 LD_LIBRARY_PATH 30 32 33 license HALCON bound to CPU ID 18 19 troubleshooting 77 bound to dongle 18 20 21 26 troubleshooting 77 bound to network card 18 19 21 23 troubleshooting 76 77 development license 9 21 23 evaluation license 9 floating license 9 12 21 23 replacement 26 license file 18 21 23 28 30 license key 22 license manager daemon 11 23 installation 11 24 25 restart 26 troubleshooting 73 uninstallation 25 license server 11 12 23 lmhostid 19 nodelocked license 9 21 22 runtime license 9 20 21 upgrade 21 22 limitations channels per image 63 contour points 63 Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01
22. not be a server in the sense that it must be a big server machine or have a special kind of operating system e g Windows NT Server installed Moreover you can use different architectures for the license server and the HALCON applications respectively e g a Linux workstation for the license server and Windows for running HALCON The only requirement is that the computer acting as the license server must be accessible whenever HALCON is to be used Please note that for evaluating purposes you can obtain a temporary evaluation license from you distributor free of charge 10 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 1 Installation This section describes how to install HALCON from CD how to in stall HALCON from the WWW is described in MVTec s download area http www mvtec com halcon download Most of the work is done by the pro vided installation scripts The file release_notes html within the HALCON package contains the latest information Except of UNIX specific sections file paths and environment variables are printed in the Win dows convention e g RHALCONROOT examples extension_package halconuser to denote the subdirectory halconuser containing an example package within the HALCON base directory referenced by the environment variable HALCONROOT see section 2 4 for more information on environment variables The same expression in UNIX convention would look like HALCONROOT examples extension_
23. of features and transformations See the Extension Package Programmer s Manual for internal details 4 3 The HALCON Frame Grabber Interface Currently HALCON provides interfaces about 50 frame grabbers in form of dynamically loadable libraries Windows DLLs UNIX shared libraries These libraries are installed together with the HALCON libraries see section 2 1 4 for the file structure Library names start with the prefix HFG the libraries starting with parHFG are used by Parallel HALCON see also section 5 3 2 In the following we give a brief overview of the HALCON frame grabber interface please refer to the Application Note on Image Acquisition for detailed information about this topic The HALCON frame grabber interface libraries form the bridge between software provided by the frame grabber s manufacturer and HALCON They form a common generic interface by providing the following operators open_framegrabber opens and configures a specified frame grabber Depending on the frame grabber several parameters must be specified e g describing the type of the used camera or the port the camera is connected to info_framegrabber returns information about a specified frame grabber e g the default parameters used by open_framegrabber set_framegrabber_param and get_framegrabber_param allow to set or read additional pa rameters Which parameters are supported by a HALCON frame grabber interface can be queried via the operato
24. to do is to call the operator open_framegrabber with parameters describing the desired image format and grabbing mode Then you can grab images simply by calling the operator grab_image O New frame grabbers may easily be integrated If you use a frame grabber not already supported by HALCON you can easily integrate a corresponding interface into HALCON For this HALCON provides a transparent frame grabber interface with sample source code for integrating new frame grabbers The only thing you have to do is to adapt this code to a specific frame grabber and to link it to the HALCON code The Frame Grabber Integration Programmer s Manual describes in detail how to do this COM is a Microsoft standard for component based software programs written in COM can be used in environments such as Visual Basic Visual C Microsoft NET or Delphi HALCON 6 1 4 4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING HALCON Alternatively you can convert your own images to HALCON images by passing HAL CON a pointer to the image buffer using the operator gen_imagei_extern DO HALCON may easily be extended by new operators Although HALCON already contains about 1000 operators for various tasks you may wish to implement a new one e g in order to access a special hardware or to imple ment an alternative algorithm To do so HALCON provides the Extension Package Interface that allows the integration of new operators implemented in C in form of so called extension p
25. to files To experiment with examples we therefore recommend to create a private copy in your own working directory e filter This directory contains predefined filter masks e images This directory contains example images and in subdirectories image sequences These images are used by the example programs described above e include This directory contains the header files which are necessary to use HALCON within the programming languages C or C e lib This directory contains the HALCON libraries and the libraries for the supported frame grabbers interfaces Windows file extension lib UNIX file extension s0 again in subdirectories corresponding to the different platforms e license The license file license dat must be placed in this directory see section 2 3 e lut This directory contains predefined look up tables e ocr This directory contains trained fonts 2 1 5 Switching Between Different HALCON Versions You can install multiple HALCON versions on a computer and then switch between them Under Windows NT 2000 XP you must adapt those environment variables that are set during the installation 1 e APATHA AHALCONROOT and XHALCONIMAGES and those you set yourself e g AHALCONEXTENSIONS Please refer to section 2 4 1 for more information about setting environment variables If you are using the HALCON COM interface you must also re register the corresponding DLL halconx d11 for example as follows Open a
26. well Please note that none of the frame grabber operators is automatically parallelized Most of the operators are reentrant only the operators concerned with the connection to the frame grabber open_framegrabber info_framegrabber close_framegrabber and HALCON 6 1 4 70 CHAPTER 5 USING PARALLEL HALCON close_all_framegrabbers are processed completely exclusively Furthermore these oper ators are local 1 e under Windows NT 2000 XP they should be called from the main thread see section 5 2 1 Under Windows NT 2000 XP each frame grabber interface comes as two DLLs one for stan dard HALCON prefix HFG and one for Parallel HALCON prefix parHFG Both HALCON versions automatically load their interface libraries so you do not need to worry about it Under UNIX both standard HALCON and Parallel HALCON work with the same shared li brary prefix HFG 5 3 3 Extension Packages and Parallel HALCON To be used in Parallel HALCON extension packages must be provided in a second version including the prefix par in the name of the libraries For example if the package is called halconuser Parallel HALCON looks for the libraries parhalconuser dll under Windows NT 2000 XP or libparhalconuser so under UNIX respectively More information about extension packages in Parallel HALCON can be found in the Extension Package Programmer s Manual 5 3 4 Parallel HALCON and HALCON Spy As HALCON Spy see section 6 4 is working se
27. with a newer version of the FLEXIm license manager software e g from HALCON 6 1 1 to 6 1 2 or 6 1 3 2 3 5 Using a Dongle Let s take a closer look at hardware dongles As already mentioned you can use dongles for licensing only under Windows NT 2000 XP From version 6 0 2 on HALCON supports not only dongles connected to the parallel port but also USB dongles Dongles for the parallel port have IDs starting with FLEXID 6 or FLEXID 7 while USB dongles have IDs starting with FLEXID 9 Please note that you cannot use any dongle but only those supplied by MVT ec via your distributor 2 3 5 1 Dongles for the Parallel Port As described in section 2 1 1 you can let HALCON install the driver programs necessary for using dongles You can check the success of this installation in the following system dialog which should contain an entry called Sentinel e Windows NT Start gt Settings gt Control Panel D Devices e Windows 2000 Windows XP Start gt Programs gt Accessories gt System Tools gt System Info gt Software Environment then select Drivers under Windows 2000 or System Drivers under Windows XP respectively You can install configure and uninstall the dongle driver manually using an auxiliary program which is part of each HALCON installation Open a Windows Command Prompt or the dialog Start gt Run and start the program KHALCONROOTA FLEXlm i586 nt4 flexid6 7 win_nt setupx86 exe To install the
28. you get a new license you must restart the license manager daemon after replacing the license files see section 2 3 4 3 The same 1s true if you modify parts of the license file Let s take a closer look at an example license file for a floating license in figure 2 6 The line starting with SERVER tells FLEXIm the name of the host computer acting as the license server in the example halconserver its identifying information in the example network card ID and the port number in the example 27000 If you didn t send the name of the license server host computer to your distributor when re questing the license the corresponding field contains the entry unknown in this case please enter the correct host name instead Another reason for modifying the entry for the host name is e g If you are using a dongle bound license and want to switch the dongle and the license server to another computer in your network The same applies 1f you change the name of your host computer or in the case the license 1s bound to a network card ID if you move the network card to another computer You may also customize the port number This may be necessary for example if the default port number 1s used already by another software in your computer network Note that on many systems all ports lt 1024 are privileged and can only be used by privileged accounts Please keep in mind that the information contained in the line starting with SERVER is used i
29. 0 Working with Control Variables So far we have detected the ball bondings within the image Based on this segmentation we can now perform some simple measurements The most obvious measurement is to count the balls Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 10 WORKING WITH CONTROL VARIABLES 49 via count_obj in Operators gt Object gt Information count_obj FinalBalls NumBalls Similiar to the draw_rectangle1 command in section 3 5 you generated a new control variable called NumBalls containing the desired number of balls There are many different HALCON operators computing specific features of regions see Operators gt Regions D Features Among them one you might try now is smallest_circle This operator determines the posi tion and radius of the smallest circle containing each input region smallest_circle FinalBalls Row Column Radius Note that FinalBalls contains six objects Thus six circles are calculated one for each of the input regions Therefore the output control variables Row Column and Radius do not contain single values but tuples of values Again no loop construct is necessary to process all objects Tuples of control values are shown in brackets within the variable window If a tuple variable contains too many elements to be shown at once the value list is truncated and three dots are added For inspecting such a tuple just double click on the variable you want to see with the left mouse button A
30. 2 1 1 e Use the update mechanism described in section 2 1 3 in this case you must install the dongle driver manually afterwards with the auxiliary program setupx86 exe located in the directory HALCONROOT FLEX1m i586 nt4 flexid6 7 win_nt If you uninstalled HALCON before uninstalling the old driver the corresponding auxiliary program will be removed You can recover it from a HALCON 6 0 CD in the directory FLEX1m i586 nt4 dong1le if you don t have a CD we recommend to install your old HAL CON version again 2 3 5 2 Dongles for the USB Port As described in section 2 1 1 you can let HALCON install the driver programs necessary for using dongles You can check the success of this installation in the system dialog given in section 2 3 5 1 which should contain two entries called Hardlock and HASP or similar Depending on your operating system you can install configure and uninstall the dongle drivers manually using an auxiliary program which is part of each HALCON installation Open a Windows Command Prompt or the dialog Start gt Run and execute the program HALCONROOT FLEX1m i586 nt4 flexid9 hinstall exe in one of the following ways hinstall opens a dialog explaining how to use hinstall hinstall info shows the status of the drivers hinstall i installs the drivers hinstall remove removes the drivers Please note that you need administrator privileges to install the drivers Note that the HALCON uninstallation proces
31. 3D plot and select Update to see a 3D plot of the image The various visualization modes are described in detail in the HDevelop Users Manual Do not forget to change the mode back to default before continuing with the example session All the visualization modes can be modified within your program as well For example the display of the histogram is activated by dev_set_paint 3D plot See also section 3 5 to learn how to manipulate the visualization of regions Furthermore it is possible to zoom into the image Just select the menu item Visualization gt Set parameters gt zoom Click on the upper Interactive button Now you can specify a rectangle within your graphics window To do this you press the left mouse button to indicate the upper left corner Keep the button pressed and drag the mouse to the lower right corner of the desired rectangle Release the left button and click the right button once Now you have specified the image part you are interested in All visualizations are now zoomed to this image part This is the interactive way to set an image part Another possibility is the direct input of the coordinates of the image part in Visualization gt Set parameters gt zoom or to use the HDevelop operator dev_set_part To visualize the whole image again click Reset in Visualization gt Set parameters gt zoom 3 5 Creating a Region of Interest ROI Very often it is useful to specify an ROI which is used
32. 5 Operator Op Variable Watch IOl x Ico Graphics Window OX Clear Active Col 4 E Figure 3 2 The main window e Main window menus In these menus you will find the complete HDevelop functionality which is summarized in the following table For more detailed information see the HDevelop User s Manual Contains Commands for File Loading and saving of HDevelop programs and exit ing HDevelop Edit Editing a HDevelop program Execute Running a HDevelop program Visualization Customizing the graphics windows and handling their output behaviour Operators Submenus containing programming constructs HDe velop operators and all HALCON operators Suggestions Support choosing an operator Window Window management Help Opening online documentation and guides e Main window tool bar This tool bar offers shortcuts for frequently used commands Furthermore it provides the means to control the execution of an HDevelop program HALCON 6 1 4 38 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP Performs this Operation New Deletes the current program in the program window Opens a new HDevelop program Save Saves a HDevelop program Cut Deletes program lines selected in the program window Copy Copies program lines selected in the program window Paste Inserts copied lines in the program window Run Executes the HDevelop program Step Executes the next command of the HDevelop program Stop Stops t
33. 5 02 01 6 5 TROUBLESHOOTING 75 have chosen an installation with floating licenses RunD1132 C PROGRA 1 COMMON 1 INSTAL 1 engine 6 INTEL3 1 Crom Tails LaunchSetup C Program Files InstallShield Installation Information BBEC9F40 4A36 11D6 A14C 00E0296C2846 setup exe 10x9 Uninstal1lHALCON Make sure that the path C Program Files MVTec HALCON or equivalent in the above example points to the HALCONROOTY directory Note that file names that contain blanks have to be quoted with path This is true in the above example since Program Files does contain a blank Older versions of the HALCON setup program failed to do so If you encounter unquoted path names containing blanks please insert the quotation marks yourself e Only for HALCON releases lt 6 1 Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt Microsoft gt Windows gt CurrentVersion gt Uninstall gt HALCON lt Version Number gt with lt Version Number gt being the version number of the HALCON version you want to uninstall or 1s not present There you should find a key named UninstallString The value of this string should be something like this the option c is only included if you have chosen an installation with floating licenses C WINNT IsUninst exe f C Program Files MVTec HALCON Uninst isu c C Program Files MVTec HALCON FLEX1m i586 nt4 HalconUninst dll Make sure that the path C Program Files MVTec HALCON or equivalent in th
34. 6 5 on SGI Workstations Mips processors alpha compag 0sf5 1 Tru64 UNIX 5 1 gt on Alpha processors Table 2 1 Values of ARCHITECTURE for the currently supported UNIX platforms According to this variable the system switches to subdirectories which are important for running HALCON Some of them are listed below the HALCON file structure is de scribed in section 2 1 4 HALCONROOT help The operator data base is situated in this directory It is accessible by all HALCON programs to obtain information about HALCON operators HALCONROOT doc html reference hdevelop HDevelop uses this directory for online help which can be displayed by a suitable HTML browser like Netscape HALCONROOT license This directory contains the license file necessary for using HALCON HALCONROOT images If the variable HALCONIMAGES see below is not set the system looks for image files in this directory e HALCONIMAGES To search for image files specified by a relative path the system uses this environment variable As a rule it contains several directory names separated by colons on UNIX systems e ARCHITECTURE This variable designates the used platform by an abbreviation e g 1586 linux2 2 or sparc sun solaris7 its syntax is processor hardware_vendor operating system ARCHITECTURE appears in several directory paths Executable HALCON programs e g hdevelop reside in HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE It is therefore useful to in clude th
35. 6 linux2 2 gcc32 if you are using gcc 3 2 3 3 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries 2 5 3 3 Using an Extension Package Under Solaris In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link libpackage so and libpackagec so or libpackagecpp so to your objects besides libhalcon so and libhalconc so or libhalconcpp so as for any HALCON application Furthermore you have to add the package library subdirectory lib sparc sun solaris7 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the li braries 2 5 3 4 Using an Extension Package Under IRIX In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link libpackage so and libpackagec so or libpackagecpp so to your objects besides libhalcon so and libhalconc so or libhalconcpp so as for any HALCON application Furthermore you have to add the package library subdirectory lib mips sgi irix6 5 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries 2 5 3 5 Using an Extension Package Under Tru64 UNIX DIGITAL UNIX In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link libpackage so and libpackagec so or libpackagecpp so to your objects besides libhalcon so and libhalconc so or libhalconcpp so as for any HALCON application Furthermore you have to add the package library su
36. 6 linux2 2 or sparc sun solaris7 To identify a computer by its network card type lmhostid ether or just lmhostid Following the example of the previous section the output might look like this on a Windows system gt lImhostid ether lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEXlm host ID of this machine is 00e02958e36a Send the ID in this example the string 00e02958e36a to your local distributor together with the hostname of this machine in your network for example halconserver If lmhostid returns ffffffff or 0 please consult section 6 5 3 1 for troubleshooting To identify a computer by its Pentium III CPU number Windows NT 2000 XP only type lmhostid cpu64 The output now might look like this gt lmhostid cpu64 lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEXIm host ID of this machine is 10003 CIDE 01IC39 E79F Do not start the program from the Explorer You must use a Command Prompt HALCON 6 1 4 20 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION Used Modules af Basic operators ag Image region J LD management Image filters Sub pixel operators Template matching er na Region processing Morphology Background estimation Optical character recognition Fourier descriptors Wiener filter Camera calibration Tools System Barcode reader Optical character verification Figure 2 2 Used modules in the example program in chapter
37. APTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS Your license is not valid on this machine Incase of floating licenses There are too many licenses active Lost connection to license server Verify if the license server is running You may also check whether your machine is properly connected with the server For this you may need to contact your system admin istrator No license for this operator The operator which you try to execute belongs to a HALCON module which is not li censed Obtain a new license including this module Wrong architecture This error indicates that you are using an architecture which is not compatible with your HALCON version Check the variable ARCHITECTURE or try to install the proper HAL CON version hdevelop Command not found Check your system environment variable PATH It has to include the path HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE lib can t open file For UNIX architectures you have to check the system variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH see section 2 4 2 No help files for package lt package name gt in directory lt directory gt Possible reasons for this error message are e No files XHALCONROOT help if the package name is system or no help files in one of the user packages e If the package name is system Wrong HALCONROOT e Check the file protection Probably HDevelop cannot access important files Help file for package lt package name gt is corrupt Possible reasons for this error message are
38. CON if you call the standard HALCON version e g from HDevelop instead of Parallel HDevelop a corresponding error message is returned Similarly if you call the operator on a single processor computer it will return an error message As a shortcut you may call the executable hcheck_parallel which resides in the directory HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTUREA Upon calling check_par_hw_potential Parallel HALCON examines every operator that can be sped up in principle by an automatic parallelization Each examined operator is processed several times both sequentially and in parallel with a changing set of input parameter values e g images The latter helps to evaluate dependencies between an operator s input parameter characteristics e g the size of an input image and the efficiency of its parallel processing This examination may take up to 10 minutes depending on your computer The extracted information is stored in the registry under Windows NT 2000 XP or in the file halcon_par_info in the directory HALCONROOT under UNIX Please note that on some op erating systems you need special privileges to initialize Parallel HALCON successfully other wise the operator check_par_hw_potential 1s not able to store the extracted information Un der Windows 2000 you need administrator privileges or the group privileges Power User Under UNIX per default only the user who installed HALCON can create or modify the file halcon_par_i
39. CONROOT and unpack it there Then add the complete path of the package e g HALCONROOT packages halconuser HALCON 6 1 4 32 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION to the environment variable HALCONEXTENSIONS Note that the delimiter between paths in an environment variable is a semicolon on Windows systems and a colon on UNIX systems Never change the name of a package or the corresponding names of the li braries or DLLs contained in a package These names are encoded within the libraries DLLs If you change the names this information will not match any longer Thus the loader of the operating system will fail to open the dynamic libraries If the package contains images used e g within example programs you might want to in clude the corresponding directory images within the package in the environment variable HALCONIMAGES see section 2 4 to access those images without specifying a complete path 2 5 2 Using an Extension Package Within HDevelop In order to use a new package within HDevelop under Windows NT 2000 XP Solaris IRIX or Tru64 UNIX DIGITAL UNIX you just have to restart the program HDevelop automatically integrates all extension packages specified in HALCONEXTENSIONS 1 e the operators contained in a package can be accessed and used like any other HALCON operator Under Linux you have to include the package library subdirectory 1ib i586 linux2 2 or 1ib i586 linux2 2 gcc32 if you are using gcc
40. FLEX1m license manager if you leave out this option After the installation the daemon is not started automatically If you have administrator privi leges you can start it directly in the dialog by selecting it and then clicking the start button or icon if this fails please check whether the entries in the license file are correct The license manager daemon is started automatically whenever you re boot the computer Note that if you installed the license manager daemon manually you must also uninstall it manually before you uninstall HALCON otherwise it remains installed Uninstalling the License Manager Daemon Please note that for the following procedure you need administrator privileges Before you can uninstall the license manager daemon you must first stop it Open the Windows dialog showing the state of the installed services see above select the entry HALCON Licenses and then click the stop button or icon Note that under Windows 2000 and Windows XP an error message may appear which can safely be ignored Now open a Windows Command Prompt change into the directory RHALCONROOTA FLEXlm i586 nt4 and type installs r n HALCON Licenses To check whether the uninstallation succeeded re open the services dialog which should not contain an entry HALCON Licenses anymore 2 3 4 2 Installing the License Manager Daemon Under UNIX On UNIX systems the license manager daemon lmgrd must be started from the appro priate st
41. HALCON Version 6 1 4 i MVTec Software GmbH Getting Started with HALCON User s Manual Getting Started with HALCON Version 6 1 4 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher Edition 1 July 1997 Edition 2 November 1997 Edition 3 March 1998 HALCON 5 1 Edition 4 April 1999 HALCON 5 2 Edition 5 October 2000 HALCON 6 0 Edition 5a July 2001 HALCON 6 0 1 Edition 5b February 2002 HALCON 6 0 2 Edition 6 June 2002 HALCON 6 1 Edition 6a December 2002 HALCON 6 1 1 Edition 6b May 2003 HALCON 6 1 2 Edition 6c April 2004 HALCON 6 1 3 EC Copyright 1997 2005 by MVTec Software GmbH M nchen Germany vrec sotare cmon Microsoft Windows Windows NT Windows 2000 Windows XP Visual Basic Visual C and Microsoft NET are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds Sun and Solaris are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems Silicon Graphics SGI and IRIX are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics Inc DIGITAL UNIX Alpha AXP and Tru64 are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Com paq Computer Corporation Intel and Pentium are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corpora
42. IX See section 1 2 for more information O HALCON supports multi threaded applications by being thread safe HALCON is thread safe under Windows NT 2000 XP Linux and Solaris Note that for an extensive use of parallel programming techniques you should choose Parallel HALCON see section 1 3 O HALCON supports data exchange with other applications For easy exchange of image data HALCON supports several file formats such as Tiff Sun Raster Gif PNM PNG JPEG PCX XWD BMP binary Other data e g inte ger result values for image coordinates may be exchanged via the HALCON language interfaces Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 1 2 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 5 1 2 System Requirements Table 1 1 shows the requirements for running HALCON 6 0 on the different supported op erating systems It should run on newer versions of an operating system however we cannot guarantee this Windows NT is no longer supported on Alpha processors following Microsoft s corresponding decision Tru64 UNIX 5 1 Table 1 1 Platforms supported by HALCON Note that under Linux libc6 glibc 2 1 x is required which is the case for most current Linux distributions like RedHat or SuSE Please check your distribution s documentation HALCON can also be used on the Philips TriMedia DSP with the host computer running Win dows NT 2000 XP Please refer to the HALCON C User s Manual for more infomation 1 3 Introducing Parallel HALCON
43. Iconic data is related to the original image images regions XLD objects see below Control data are all kinds of numerical values such as integers floating point numbers or strings this kind of data defines input values for operator control parameters and is used to build complex structures like bar charts or arrays of control values Both iconic and control data are processed according to the tuple scheme within HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 4 2 HANDLING ICONIC AND CONTROL DATA 57 4 2 1 Tuple Processing Whenever an input or output parameter of a HALCON operator contains data it may be a single object value or a tuple of objects values If a tuple is passed HALCON processes the operator simultaneously on all tuple members For example if you want to process a median filter on six different images you might call the operator median image six times with varying input images Or you might generate a tuple containing all six images and call median_image once with the tuple as input object HALCON filters all tuple elements simultaneously and returns a tuple containing six filtered images We have seen another example before in chapter 3 where several regions have been extracted from an input image The regions became elements of one region tuple If you want to know the center of all regions you simply have to pass this tuple to the operator area_center HALCON then returns a tuple of integer pairs con
44. LCONROOT bin i586 nt4 During installation this path is automatically added to the environment variable PATH see Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 4 CONFIGURATION 29 below The libraries which you need for linking programs e g halcon lib reside in the directory 4HHALCONROOT lib i586 nt4 e HALCONEXTENSIONS This is a list of directories in which user defined extension operators so called exten sion packages are kept Each package consists of a number of operators linked into a shared library plus the additional operator documentation in help files and HTML files See section 2 5 for information on how to install an extension package and the Extension Package Programmer s Manual for details on creating your own extension packages e HALCONSPY If this environment variable is defined regardless of the value before you start a HAL CON program the HALCON debugging tool HALCON Spy is activated This corre sponds to call the HALCON operator set_spy with the parameters mode on within a HALCON program The main difference between the two modes for activating HALCON Spy is that by defining HALCONSPY it is possible to monitor an already linked HALCON program during runtime without modifications For further information on how to use HALCON Spy and how to parameterize it via this environment variable please refer to section 6 4 e PATH During the installation the directories HALCONROOT bin i586 nt4 and RHALCONRO
45. N 6 0 1 thus by installing HALCON 6 1 x you would disable such an older ActivVisionTools installation Therefore the setup program of HALCON 6 1 x checks whether there is an ActivVisionTools installation on your computer Depending on the version the following action 1s performed e ActivVisionTools 2 1 or 2 2 If the setup of HALCON 6 1 1 or higher detects ActivVisionTools 2 1 or 2 2 no fur ther action is required as this version is fully compatible Unfortunately the setup of HALCON 6 1 wrongly warns that ActivVisionTools 2 1 is not compatible you can safely ignore this warning and proceed e ActivVisionTools 2 0 If HALCON 6 1 x detects ActivVisionTools 2 0 it offers to replace the corresponding OCX ActivVTools ocx with a new one which is compatible to HALCON 6 1 x Typi cally you will choose this option If not you can replace it manually as follows Opena Windows Command Prompt and change into the subdirectory bin i586 nt4 of the root directory of your ActivVisionTools installation Unregister ActivVTools ocx by typing regsvr32 u ActivVTools ocx Then delete the OCX or rename it and replace it by the new one which can be found on the CD in the directory misc i586 nt4 avt20 or in the Activ VisionTools download area http www activ vision tools com download Register the new OCX by typing regsvr32 ActivVTools ocx As an alternative to the Command Prompt you can unregister and register the OCX via the dialog Start gt
46. ON 6 1 x your distributor provides you with a so called upgrade license file In this case you must append the content of this file at the end of the old license file HALCONROOT license license dat see figure 2 5 for an example Please note that some editors insert special characters which cannot be interpreted by FLEXIm Under Windows systems we recommend to use WordPad Due to a bug in the FLEXIm software you might encounter problems if you upgrade twice e g from HALCON 5 2 to 6 0 and then to 6 1 In this case please contact your distributor for further instructions esteso MVTec Software GmbH ID 00e02958e3b6 CREPERIE IO LIRE FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted BC4D86743889FC4CFAC2 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 109 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted 5CFD86941816A696B16F VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 00e02958e3b6 ck 30 Figure 2 3 Nodelocked development license bound to network card HEHE HE RE RE HEHE HERE RE RE REED RE REA RARA MVTec Software GmbH ID FLEXID 7 b285ff7f HEHE HEHE RE HEHE RE RE RE RE RE RE RE REED REA AREE FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 1 01 jan 0000 uncounted 3C574319AF86C4A5DE4A VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID FLEXID 7 b285ff7f ck 35 Figure 2 4 Nodelocked runtime license bound to dongle See the FLEXIm end user manual on how to configure this location HALCON 6 1 4 22 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION original license
47. OT FLEXlm i586 nt4 are automatically added to the system variable PATH Please take a look at the file release_notes html within the HALCON package for the latest information 2 4 2 Configuring HALCON Under UNIX Under UNIX different shells offer different commands to set environment variables e g setenv lt variable gt lt value gt or export lt variable gt lt value gt Please consult your shell s documentation for further information If a value consists of multiple items those items must be separated by colons Below you find a list of environment variables used by the HALCON library and by HDe velop We recommend to set them in a login script or a shell resource script e g cshrc or profile Examples for entries in cshrc setenv HALCONROOT usr local halcon setenv ARCHITECTURE 1586 linux2 2 setenv PATH HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH HALCONROOT 1ib ARCHITECTURE setenv HALCONIMAGES HALCONROOT images e HALCONROOT This is the most important environment variable It designates the directory where HAL CON is installed Typical paths are for example usr local halcon or usr halcon HALCON 6 1 4 30 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION Operating System Platform Compiler i586 linux2 2 i gcc 2 95 l l Linux 2 2 2 4 on Intel Pentium or compatible 1566 lin x2 2 g 32 BCC 2 340 GG Solaris 7 on Sparc Workstations mi ps sei irix6 5 IRIX
48. PU ID 77 dongle 77 network card 76 77 memory management 3 55 news 71 nodelocked license 9 21 22 operator knowledge base 1 44 55 71 operator library 1 56 Index runtime license 20 21 runtime version 9 uninstallation 16 troubleshooting 73 update 12 upgrade license 21 22 HALCON Spy 29 31 72 Parallel HALCON 70 HALCONEXTENSIONS 29 31 32 HALCONIMAGES 28 30 HALCONROOT 28 29 HALCONSPY 29 31 72 HDevelop 3 break point BP 38 43 example session 35 export of programs to C 3 to C 3 to COM 3 graphics window 36 39 41 45 insertion cursor 38 39 main window 36 menus 37 Edit 37 Execute 37 File 37 Help 37 Operators 37 Suggestions 37 44 Visualization 37 Window 37 online help 44 56 alternatives 71 cross references 72 debugging 72 keywords 71 predecessors 71 references 71 successors 71 operator window 36 38 40 text field 39 41 44 program counter PC 38 39 program window 36 38 40 session management 36 tool bar 37 Activate 38 Copy 38 Cut 38 Deactivate 38 83 Feature histogram 38 Gray value histogram 38 Gray value inspection 38 New 38 Open 38 Paste 38 Region inspection 38 Reset 38 Run 38 Save 38 Set parameters 38 Step 38 Stop 38 Zooming 38 troubleshooting 77 variable window 36 38 40 41 HMatchlt 2 HOME 31 iconic object 56 image 57 region 57 XLD 59 iconic variable 41 if 54 image 57 channel image
49. TemplRow Columni Column TemplCol Row2 Row TemplRow Column2 Column TemplCo1l You should make sure that the region visualization is set to margin using Visualization gt draw before executing this command Figure 3 12 The final result of the ball detection based on pattern matching If you do not need the template any longer it should be cleared with the HALCON operator clear_template Summarizing the ball detection using pattern matching was done by the following sequence of HALCON operators 4Again there is a multi grid version of this matching operator but since we already restricted the search to a very small part of the image it is not too interesting to use best_match_mg in this case Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 11 FINDING BONDING BALLS USING PATTERN MATCHING 53 read_image Die die3 draw_rectanglei WindowID Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 gen_rectanglei ROI Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 reduce_domain Die ROI ImageReduced create_template ImageReduced 5 4 sort original TemplateID fast_match_mg Die Matches TemplateID 20 3 connection Matches BallROI add_channels BallROI Die BallImage best_match BallImage TemplateID 20 true Row Column Error clear_template TemplateID Note that the check for correct shape and area of each ball is implicitly done by the pattern matching In the previous approach this was performed by the opening_circle opera
50. Windows Command Prompt and change into the subdirectory bin i586 nt4 of the root directory of your old HALCON installation Unregister halconx dll by typing regsvr32 u halconx dll Then change into the corresponding subdirectory of your other HALCON installation and reg ister its halconx d11 by typing regsvr32 halconx dll As an alternative to the Command Prompt you can unregister and register halconx dll via the dialog Start gt Run together with the Windows Explorer In the latter open the di rectory bin i586 nt4 of the root directory of your old HALCON installation Now type regsvr32 u the dialog Run and then drag and drop halconx d11 from the Explorer into the dialog where it automatically appears with the full path To execute the command click OK Then open the directory bin i586 nt4 of the root directory of the other HALCON installa tion in the Explorer type regsvr32 in the dialog Run drag and drop halconx d11 from the Explorer into the dialog and again click OK Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 1 INSTALLATION 15 Under UNIX you switch to another HALCON version by setting the environment variables HALCONROOT and derived variables like HALCONIMAGES PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly see also section 2 4 2 2 1 6 Information for Users of ActivVisionTools Only ActivVisionTools 2 1 and 2 2 are based on HALCON 6 1 while the older versions 1 0 to 2 0 are all based on HALCON 6 0 or HALCO
51. _bg_esti 68 variable window HDevelop 36 38 40 41 Visual Basic 1 3 56 Visual C 3 visualization images 41 regions 43 45 volatile grabbing 62 Windows 2000 71 76 77 Windows NT 77 Windows NT 2000 XP 1 4 5 10 16 24 28 32 Windows XP 71 76 77 write_image 45 68 XLD 59 Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Index
52. ackages It contains several predefined routines and macros for the easy handling of image data and memory objects in C Once a new operator has been successfully integrated it can be used like any other HALCON operator The Extension Package Programmer s Manual contains detailed information about extend ing the operator library O HALCON allows continued application of already implemented image processing software Software engineering is a time consuming process and in most cases expensive as well So everyone is interested in using already implemented software as long as possible and no one is bent on re implementing their software with every installation of new software components Therefore HALCON supports the continued application of al ready implemented software Convert your programs into new HALCON operators to use them within HALCON as described above Moreover HALCON hardly restricts the hardware configuration A wide range of machines and systems can be used Various frame grabbers are supported New ones may be easily integrated see below Thus you need not change your hardware configuration and therefore also need not to change your software DO HALCON supports a wide range of platforms HALCON is largely architecture independent and therefore allows you to use the system of your choice It supports different operating systems such as Windows NT 2000 XP Linux Solaris Tru64 UNIX formerly called DIGITAL UNIX or IR
53. action of the fin impossible region after dilation original image background region within background region region after clipping region after erosion within to image size clipped region region after erosion without clipping a difference between this region resulting region is too and the background region exctracts the fin small correct extraction of the fin is not possible Figure 4 4 Example of region processing 4 2 4 XLD Objects XLD is the abbreviation for eXtended Line Description This is a data structure used for describ ing areas e g arbitrarily sized regions or polygons or any closed or open contour 1 e also lines In contrast to regions which represent all areas at pixel precision XLD objects provide subpixel precision There are two basic XLD structures contours and polygons HALCON 6 1 4 60 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON An XLD object is built up by setting base points along the contour lines and connecting them with lines They can represent a contour or set of lines at any precision by varying the number and position of the base points at subpixel precision Additional information such as gradient filter response or angle is stored with the points and lines Typically XLD objects describe the result of operators for edge line detection e g edges_sub_pix lines_gauss In particular they are used for image processing at subpixel precision and offer a wide range
54. an optimized encoding to reduce memory costs O HALCON allows to focus image processing on a region of interest Each image object has a domain its area of definition that can be changed by the user When performing an image operator it 1s processed only within the domain of the input image This concept allows to focus image processing on regions of interest ROIs and therefore to speed it up O HALCON provides very fast pattern matching operators Pattern matching is very helpful in numerous areas of application but often not used due to its costs of computation time HALCON allows to use pattern matching where you want to as it uses a very efficient implementation of various pattern matching algo rithms O HALCON provides shape based matching operators that work even in the presence of occlusion or clutter HALCON provides not only pattern matching but also shape based matching operators With these operators you can recognize objects even if they are scaled partly occluded or in the presence of clutter or changing illumination conditions From version 6 1 on HALCON provides the auxiliary tool HMatchIt which lets you configure and test the matching process with a few mouse clicks besides this tool helps you to optimize the parameters interactively to get the maximum matching speed and recognition rate O HALCON provides an easy handling of tuple objects and processes tuple elements simultaneously Tuples are very he
55. an process one image while the next image is grabbed Then buffers are switched so that with the third grab the first image is overwritten Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 4 4 LIMITATIONS 63 4 3 4 Using Frame Grabbers Without a HALCON Interface If you use a frame grabber that is not yet supported by HALCON you can integrate a cor responding interface into HALCON How to create and integrate a frame grabber interface 1s described in the Frame Grabber Integration Programmer s Manual which also contains sample source code If you already have a program that communicates with the API of your frame grabber and want to use HALCON to process the images you can convert the images grabbed by your program to HALCON images by passing HALCON a pointer to the image buffer using the operator gen_imagel_extern 4 4 Limitations There are some HALCON limitations which you have to keep in mind although you won t come even near these limits in most applications e Maximum image size 32767 x 32767 e Maximum number of image matrices in memory 100000 e Maximum number of objects per parameter 100000 e Maximum number of channels per image 1000 e Maximum number of values in a tuple 1000000 e Maximum number of contour points 30000 e Maximum number of polygon control points 10000 e Range for coordinates from 32768 to 32767 e Maximum length of strings 1024 characters Not to be confused with image objects since object
56. and the end value NumBall1s control statement for Inside the loop check the error value of each match and skip faulty matches tor i 1 to NumBallls by 1 dat Siege loi 265 disp_rectanglei Rowi Row i 1 TemplRow Columni Column i 1 Temp1Col Row2 Row i 1 TemplRow Column2 Column i 1 TemplCo1l RealNumBalls RealNumBalls 1 endif endfor Display the original image Die again and execute the above loop to see the result A template position which is actually outside of the current image because Row and Column specify the position of the center of the template Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Chapter 4 Philosophy of HALCON This chapter explains the basic concepts of the HALCON system its modular architecture and its data structures Furthermore it describes HALCON s frame grabber interface 4 1 Modular Structure Applications Visual Frame grabber Interface Extension Package Iconic Data Management Operator Knowledge Bas Figure 4 1 Layered structure of HALCON The base of HALCON is the data management together with the operator knowledge base The data management is reponsible for basic memory management optimized for image processing 55 56 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON and on top of this for the creation handling and deletion of iconic objects and tuples The knowledge base stores information about operators which can be accessed while the system is running
57. artup file called e g etc init d boot local sbin init d boot local etc rc boot etc rc local or etc localrc please consult your system s documenta tion Add the following long line to this file with suitable path to lmgrd etc lmgrd c HALCONROOT license license dat gt HALCONROOT license license log 2 gt amp 1 amp where HALCONROOT is the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the installation Please note that 1mgrda will only work properly when started with root privileges HALCON 6 1 4 26 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 3 4 3 Restarting the License Manager Daemon Whenever you replace a floating license or modify it you must restart the license manager daemon One possible method is to reboot the computer acting as the license server If you have administrator privileges you can also restart the daemon manually On Windows systems open the dialog showing the state of the installed services Windows NT Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Services Windows 2000 and Windows XP Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Administrative Tools gt Component Services gt Services se lect the entry HALCON Licenses and then stop and start it again On UNIX systems you stop the process l1mgrd and then restart it with the line used in the startup file see section 2 3 4 2 Another reason for restarting the license manager daemon is when you update to a HALCON release that uses
58. bdirectory 1ib alpha compag osf5 1 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the li braries HALCON 6 1 4 34 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Chapter 3 A First Look at HDevelop In this chapter you will learn how to solve an image analysis problem from the scratch Dur ing an example session the most Important features of HDevelop are going to be introduced You will become familiar with HDevelop s graphical user interface GUI and learn to use it efficiently The example is chosen from the domain of quality control The goal is to detect all ball bondings on a die see figure 3 1 The HDevelop program corresponding to the example session 1s included in the HALCON package subdirectory RHALCONROOT examples hdevelop Manuals GettingStarted example dev In particular it will be shown e how to construct a HDevelop program with HALCON operators e how to find suitable operators and parameter values e how to handle iconic and control variables e how to handle the graphics window e how to generate a region of interest ROD e how to solve the example problem using morphology e how to solve the example problem by pattern matching and e how to use control constructs Read this chapter very carefully and you will understand the basic interactive features of HDe velop This will help you to develop your own sophisticated ima
59. c If the frame grabber has already finished grabbing the image grab_image_async returns directly with the image otherwise the operator waits until the frame grabber has finished Furthermore grab_image_async allows to specify how old the grabbed image is allowed to be If the image is too old grab_image_async automatically starts a new grab and waits for its completion Before returning the operator grab_image_async automatically starts a new grab therefore you do not need to call the op erator grab_image_start anymore after the first grab Note that asynchronous grabbing is the more powerful of the two modes but requires a careful timing on the part of the user In other words image processing application side and grabbing process frame grabber can only run asynchronously if the operator grab_image_async 1s called when the image is already grabbed and not too old already 4 3 2 Using External Triggers Independent of the grabbing mode you can use an external trigger signal to start the actual grabbing process in the camera if the frame grabber supports this option and thereby synchro nize the image grabbing to a physical process e g by using photoelectric barriers that report when a part has arrived for inspection All you need to do to use this feature from HALCON is to specify a corresponding parameter in the call to open_framegrabber HALCON 6 1 4 62 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON Please note the difference betw
60. driver select the menu item Functions gt Install Afterwards reboot your computer Then the driver should appear in the dialog described above Please note that you need administrator privileges to install the driver If you try to install the driver without ad ministrator privileges the setup program might falsely state that the installation was successful Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 3 LICENSING 21 You might need to configure the driver if your computer has more than one parallel port Note that the HALCON uninstallation process does not uninstall the dongle driver as it might also be used by another application The uninstallation removes the auxiliary pro gram though Therefore if you want to uninstall the driver do so before uninstalling HALCON of course the program can still be found on the HALCON CD in the directory FLEX1m i586 nt4 flexid6 7 win_nt Special Information for HALCON 6 0 2 As already mentioned in sections 2 1 3 and 2 2 1 you must pay special attention to the dongle driver when installing HALCON 6 0 2 We recommend the following procedure e Uninstall the old driver manually the corresponding auxiliary program setupx86 exe can be found in the directory HALCONROOT FLEX1m i586 nt4 dongle e Now there are two ways to install HALCON 6 0 2 e Uninstall your old HALCON version as described in section 2 2 1 then install HAL CON 6 0 2 together with the new dongle driver as described in section
61. duced 5 4 sort original TemplateID To obtain the center of the template which will be needed for visualization purposes later use the following assign statements TemplRow Rowi Row2 2 TemplCol Coli Col2 2 After the creation of the template you have the choice between different matching algorithms We will use a two step strategy First a fast matching operator 1s applied to find all image points where the template might match In the second step within each cluster of such points the exact position of the template will be determined The HALCON operator fast_match again in Operator gt Filter gt Match delivers the region Matches containing all possible matching positions fast_match Die Matches TemplateID 20 Double click on the original image Die and the result region Match to see these positions The input parameter MaxError is set to 20 in this example There is a trade off between performance and fault tolerance of the matching Decrease the value and watch the execution time when applying the operator For very small values of the tolerated error some of the balls might be missed On the other hand increasing the value decreases the performance significantly Besides fast_match there is also a HALCON operator fast_match_mg working on different resolution levels which in general increases the performance Just try fast_match_mg Die Matches TemplateID 20 3 to perform a search with th
62. e license server daemon Furthermore the section Troubleshooting now offers help if licensing via a network board fails under Windows 2000 Since HALCON 6 0 1 does not support HP UX anymore the corresponding sections have been deleted from the manual Edition 5 HALCON 6 0 October 2000 The manual has been completely revised regarding structure and content with exception of the HDevelop example session An additional chapter concerning Parallel HALCON has been introduced The information about installing licensing and configuring HAL CON has been extended and moved to an own chapter The chapter Philosophy has been extended by a section describing the HALCON frame grabber interface Contents 1 Introducing HALCON 2 3 1 1 Da Jo 1 4 Facts about HALCON O LL System Kegtirem nts i ke c ee de e e iio e e eee a Introducing Parallel HALCON gt esile e I Additional Sources of Information o oaoa a a a a Installation Licensing Configuration 21 di 2 3 2 4 Ra belle iena AREZZO ble Ulisse tana i 2 1 3 Updating HALCON Windows NT 2000 XP only 2 1 4 The Installed File Structure LL 2 1 5 Switching Between Different HALCON Versions 2 1 6 Information for Users of ActivVisionTools iti SCE ee ee PR EER ee ee ee ee ee 2 2 1 Windows NT 2000 XP aoaaa Bee WAP ks ea DIE cairo dh de a a a kia adea a haa ha 2 3 1 Extracting Identifying Information
63. e above example points to the HALCONROOTY directory Note that file names that contain blanks have to be quoted with path This is true in the above example since Program Files does contain a blank Older versions of the HALCON setup program failed to do so If you encounter unquoted path names containing blanks please insert the quotation marks yourself 4 Close the registry editor and try to run the uninstaller again e Uninstallation failed If the automatic uninstallation fails for another reason proceed as follows e For floating licenses only Uninstall the license manager daemon as described in section 2 3 4 1 e Start regedit and delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt MVTec gt HALCON HALCON 6 1 4 76 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS e Only for HALCON releases gt 6 1 Also delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt Microsoft gt Windows gt CurrentVersion gt Uninstall gt BBEC9F40 4A36 11D6 A14C 00E0296C2846 e Only for HALCON releases lt 6 1 Also delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt Microsoft gt Windows gt CurrentVersion gt Uninstall gt HALCON e Using e g the Windows Explorer delete the directory hSystemRoot Profiles All Users Start Menu Programs MVTec HALCON Note that ZSystemRooty usually is C WINNT e Finally delete the HALCON base directory HALCONROOT 6 5 3 Problems Concerning Licenses If you encounter problems wi
64. e cor responding operator change the parameter and press Apply The operator will be executed immediately and its result will be visualized Repeat this process until you are satisfied with the HALCON 6 1 4 46 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP b N ay ei _ ry n a i eB Ra 7am m Figure 3 7 The region object BrightRegion containing all pixels with gray values larger or equal 128 result then press Ok But remember to clear the window or underlay the original image before each new execution of an operator returning a region Otherwise you only see the accumulated visualization of all regions you generate during the parameter tuning 3 8 Finding the Board as ROI Looking at the input image Die you will notice that the surface of the board is quite bright Thus by applying the threshold operator with the default values 128 and 255 a reasonable raw segmentation of the board can be achieved We will now transform this raw segmentation into a region of interest for the ball detection Select the HALCON operator shape_trans with BrightRegion the result of the thresholding as input region and rectangle2 as value for the parameter type to obtain the smallest rectangle of arbitrary orientation containing BrightRegion The resulting region called ROI is a reasonable approximation of the board in the image As in section 3 5 reduce the domain of the original image to this ROI with the reduce_domain o
65. e found under http support microsoft com support kb articles Q239 9 24 asp Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 6 5 TROUBLESHOOTING 17 e lmhostid ether returns ffffffff or 0 If lmhostid returns ffffffff or 0 this usually indicates that you do not have a network board If you do have one on Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems check whether the client for Microsoft networks is installed in the dialog Start gt Settings gt Network and Dial up Connections gt Local Area Connections gt Properties If the client for Microsoft networks does not appear in the list install it by clicking Install and then selecting it from the list of clients Then repeat the steps described in sections 2 3 1 1 or 2 3 1 2 On Windows NT systems check whether the NetBEUI and TCP IP protocols are installed in the dialog Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Network gt Protocol If the proto cols do not appear in the dialog please install these two protocols by adding them in the dialog Then repeat the steps described in sections 2 3 1 1 or 2 3 1 2 e Multiple IDs for only one network card On Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems sometimes more than one ID is returned even if there is only a single network card In this case use the ID that remains when both the NetBEUI and IPX SPX protocols are disabled Alternatively use the ID that does not change when you reboot the machine e lmhostid cpu64 returns If lmhostid return
66. e path HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE in the environment variable PATH of a shell script Shared libraries reside in the directory SHALCONROOT 1ib ARCHITECTURE Table 2 1 gives an overview of the currently supported UNIX platforms and the corre sponding values of ARCHITECTURE e PATH If you want to start HDevelop from an arbitrary directory you must include the HALCON program path HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE in the system variable PATH e LD_LIBRARY_PATH Please include the HALCON library path HALCONROOT 1ib ARCHITECTURE in the sys previously called DIGITAL UNIX Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 5 INTEGRATING A HALCON EXTENSION PACKAGE 31 tem variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH This is necessary both for running HDevelop and for cre ating stand alone applications e HALCONEXTENSIONS This is a list of directories in which user defined extension operators so called exten sion packages are kept Each package consists of a number of operators linked into a shared library plus the additional operator documentation in help files and HTML files See section 2 5 for information on how to install an extension package and the Extension Package Programmer s Manual for details on creating your own extension packages e HALCONSPY If this environment variable is defined regardless of the value before you start a HAL CON program the HALCON debugging tool HALCON Spy is activated This corre sponds to call the HALCON operator set_sp
67. e port number of the floating license daemon Edition 6a HALCON 6 1 1 December 2002 The manual has been clarified and extended at many points For example it now clearly states that an application can only use one HALCON language interface that the license file MUST be called license dat and describes how to upgrade a license DOS shells are now called Windows Command Prompts Furthermore the section regarding floating licenses has been extended and the troubleshooting for problems during uninstallation now differentiates between HALCON 6 0 and 6 1 Finally the manual reflects the support of gcc 3 2 Edition 6 HALCON 6 1 June 2002 The problems occurring in conjunction with the new version of the dongle driver required for HALCON 6 0 2 and their solution are described in the corresponding sections Fur thermore the installation process is now described in more detail including information on how to switch between different HALCON versions A new section contains additional information for users of Activ VisionTools Edition 5b HALCON 6 0 2 February 2002 The manual now contains more details regarding the use of dongles parallel port and USB including how to install configure and uninstall the corresponding device drivers Edition 5a HALCON 6 0 1 July 2001 The manual now contains more information about how to install HALCON and the license file when using floating licenses and about the customization of the port number of th
68. een the two ways of synchronizing described here and in the previous section In the synchronous grabbing mode your application software 1s synchronized with the process of image grabbing so that image processing starts directly after getting a new image When using an external trigger image grabbing is synchronized with an external process so that the grabbed image corresponds to a certain situation e g with an object directly under the camera When using an external trigger signal keep in mind that after being told to grab an image the frame grabber waits for this signal possibly ad infinitum if this signal is not triggered Together with the frame grabber calls to the operator grab_image and even grab_image_async if called before the signal comes have to wait Most HALCON frame grabber interfaces allow to specify a timeout for grabbing via the oper ator set_framegrabber_param If a grab runs into a timeout the corresponding operator returns the value H_ERR_FGTIMEOUT Please note that in order to really synchronize the grabbing process with an external event the camera must be able to start a new image immediately This feature is typically called asynchronously resettable If a camera does not have this feature the frame grabber must wait for the camera to finish its current frame before starting to grab This means that there will be a delay between the external trigger and the start of the grabbing Even worse from the point of v
69. en a pop up dialog as depicted in figure 2 2 Click Save to save the required modules in a file with the extension mod in the currently used directory Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 3 LICENSING 21 2 If the application is written in a programming language C C COM insert the op erator get_modules see the corresponding entry in the HALCON Reference Manuals for more information at the end of the program Send the thus determined module names to your local distributor when requesting a runtime license Please note that the number of modules depends on the used environment for example within HDevelop an application may need less modules than after exporting it to Visual Basic Thus we recommend to determine the number of modules in the environment used for the final application 2 3 3 Installing the License File Your local distributor will supply you with a license file This file must be put into the directory 7HALCONROOT license and be renamed to license dat if necessary HALCONROOT is the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the installation If you are using the floating license scheme you must copy the license file to all computers you installed HALCON on 1 e the computer acting as the license server and all computers where HALCON is to be used and then restart the license manager daemon as described in section 2 3 4 3 If you upgrade HALCON to a newer version e g from HALCON 6 0 x to HALC
70. erfaces will be adapted You can find the latest information together with downloadable interfaces including documentation under http www mvtec com halcon framegrabber 4 3 1 The Two Modes of Grabbing Images HALCON distinguishes two grabbing modes synchronous and asynchronous grabbing Syn chronous grabbing means that the application tells the frame grabber to grab a new image by calling the operator grab_image and waits until the image 1s ready In other words the applica tion synchronizes itself with the grabbing process The advantage of this mode is that grabbed images are always up to date However because the grabbing process can take quite a time to complete e g 40ms with standard PAL real time image processing becomes difficult 1f not impossible using synchronous grabbing Synchronous grabbing is even more problematic when using an external trigger see the following section as then the application will wait for the trigger The second mode asynchronous grabbing supports real time image processing In this mode the grabbing process is divided into two steps First the application tells the frame grabber to start grabbing a new image by calling the operator grab_image_start This operator im mediately returns thus the application can continue with its own task e g process the previ ous image while the frame grabber grabs a new image To actually fetch the new image the application calls the operator grab_image_asyn
71. erformance 45 Philips TriMedia 5 polygons 59 pouring 68 program counter HDevelop 38 39 program window HDevelop 36 38 40 break point BP 38 43 insertion cursor 38 39 program counter PC 38 39 programming language NET 3 C 1 3 56 C 1 3 56 C 56 COM 1 3 56 Delphi Borland 3 56 Visual Basic 1 3 56 Visual C 3 85 read_image 40 44 45 68 reduce domain 43 46 57 reentrant 5 67 region 57 58 chord 57 runlength encoding 57 region of interest ROI 2 41 46 57 reset_obj_db 68 runlength encoding 57 runtime version HALCON 9 segmentation 46 select_shape 48 session management HDevelop 36 set_framegrabber_lut 60 set_framegrabber_param 60 62 set_spy 29 31 72 set_system 69 shape based matching 2 shape_trans 46 skeleton 45 smallest_circle 49 smooth_image 45 Solaris 4 5 33 stop 39 subpixel precision 59 synchronous grabbing 61 system requirements 5 thread safe 4 5 67 threshold 44 46 troubleshooting HALCON installation 73 uninstallation 73 HDevelop 77 license HALCON bound to CPU ID 77 bound to dongle 77 bound to network card 76 77 license manager daemon installation 73 miscellaneous 79 Parallel HALCON 78 Tru64 UNIX 4 33 tuple 2 56 57 63 tuple objects 57 uninstallation dongle device driver 16 27 HALCON 6 1 4 86 HALCON 16 troubleshooting 73 license manager daemon 25 UNIX 1 11 17 25 26 29 update
72. f HALCON 6 0 2 the new driver cannot be installed even if the setup program might state that the installation was successful Therefore you must uninstall the dongle driver manually before uninstalling HALCON Please refer to section 2 3 5 1 for more information 2 2 2 Uninstalling HALCON Under UNIX To uninstall an existing HALCON system just remove the contents of the HALCON base directory HALCONROOT and all its subdirectories e g by executing rm rf HALCONROOT Furthermore remove the subdirectory hdevelop of the directory referenced by the environ ment variable HOME see section 2 4 2 HDevelop creates this directory to save options window positions and the file history The uninstallation process will not remove any user specific settings This means that environ ment variables remain unchanged and have to be adapted or deleted manually If you called the operator check_par_hw_potential from Parallel HALCON 6 0 beta to ini tialize Parallel HALCON see section 5 1 1 the file halcon_par_info which contains the extracted information about the host computer will be left in the directory referenced by the environment variable HOME see section 2 4 2 HALCON 6 1 4 18 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 3 Licensing HALCON checks whether the product is licensed to the user with the help of the FLEXIm license manager package from GLOBEtrotter In this section a brief summary of the default procedure t
73. functions The reason is that under Windows NT 2000 XP there exists a direct mapping between program threads and graphical elements such as windows dialog boxes or button controls In short a graphical element only exists in the context of its associated thread This can cause severe problems for example hang the applica tion if a thread tries to perform user interactions via graphical elements that belong to another thread For example you may get a deadlock if one thread opens a window via open_window and another thread tries to get input from this window via draw_circle As it is not always obvious whether an operator works with critical graphical elements or not such operators are marked as local Note that you can still use them outside the main thread however you might get problems HALCON 6 1 4 68 CHAPTER 5 USING PARALLEL HALCON 3 single write multiple read A certain group of operators should be called simultaneously only if the different calling threads work on different data For example threads should not try to modify the same template for pattern matching simultaneously by calling adapt_template with the same handle Exactly the same applies to the case that one thread should not modify a data set that is simultaneously read by another thread Other groups of operators with this be havior are concerned with file I O e g write_image read_image fwrite_string fread_string but also non HALCON file commands or
74. g functionality but some limitations e g without frame grabber or programming language interfaces Using the demo version you can test all HALCON operators within the HDevelop environment for an unlimited amount of time At the other end of the spectrum lies the full version which is used to develop applica tions based on HALCON Besides HDevelop this version includes interfaces to about 50 frame grabbers and an interface to integrate additional ones language interfaces to C C and COM and the Extension Package Interface which allows you to integrate your own HALCON operators If you have developed an application based on HALCON you can obtain a runtime version of HALCON which only contains the image processing functionality needed in your application A runtime version does not include HDevelop For the development version and for the runtime version you need a corresponding license The demo version can be used without a license There are two possible licensing schemes 1 Nodelocked licenses are only valid for one specific host or hardware dongle 2 For a development version you can also get a so called floating license Such licenses are valid on arbitrary hosts within a local network A so called license server checks the number of currently active HALCON applications A new application can be started only if the overall number of licenses is not exceeded Note that a computer acting as the HALCON license server need
75. ge analysis programs in the future 35 36 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP Figure 3 1 The image to be analyzed All ball bondings on a die have to be detected 3 1 The Graphical User Interface of HDevelop You start HDevelop under Windows NT 2000 XP by calling Start gt Programs gt MVTec HALCON gt HDevelop Under UNIX HDevelop is started from the shell by calling hdevelop Having started HDevelop the main window will appear on your screen It contains four win dows see figure 3 2 e a program window e an operator window e avariable window and e a graphics window In the following the HDevelop windows will be explained briefly For more details see the HDevelop User s Manual 3 1 1 Main window The main window is the central window and the starting point for your work It comprises the creation of a HDevelop program operator selection editing etc and the session management loading saving etc This main window is identified by the title HDevelop in the window s title bar It also contains a menu bar and a tool bar Please note that in the UNIX environment the main window the program window and the operator window are combined into one window Thus there are only three windows Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 1 THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE OF HDEVELOP 3 HDevelop OF x File Edit Execute Visualization Uperstors Suggestions Window Help Db amp esl e cd Belle
76. get used to the different methods of editing program specifying parameter values etc For now just continue with applying your first operator to read an image 3 3 Loading an Image First of all you have to create a HALCON object that contains your input image You may obtain an image in several ways The commands Copy Cut and Paste which are also very convenient to edit a HDevelop program will be explained later during this session HALCON 6 1 4 40 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP Program Ioj x read_image Die die3 a Operator of x Operator read_image v Image Die v image object FileName die3 v filename string Ok Enter Apply Cancel Help Figure 3 3 Setting the parameters of the operator read_image e You can use a frame grabber to obtain an online image see menu item Operators gt Image gt Framegrabber e You can read an image from a file see menu item Operators gt File gt Images and menu item File gt Read image e You can create a new image see menu item Operators gt Image D Creation In the example we will use the read_image operator Just select read_image in the submenu Operators gt File gt Images or type read_image in the operator window s text field and press Enter Now the operator should be displayed in the operator window see figure 3 3 The first parameter is the image object you are about to create Change the default name of the cor
77. ght want to choose an alternative operator which might be more suitable for your task Note that in many situ ations there 1s a trade off between performance and accuracy of the results For example you might use the high performance smoothing filter mean_image in one situation and the higher quality smoothing filters gauss_image or smooth_image in another e Suggestions gt See also The online help of HDevelop also offers references to other operators which are not exactly alternatives but related to the current operator in some way For example if you currently look at read_image you might be interested in the write_image operator as well e Suggestions gt Predecessor Many operators require a specific input provided by other operators For example before computing junction points in a skeleton junctions_skeleton you have to compute the skeleton itself skeleton e Suggestions D Successor On the other hand there are typical sequences of operators Hence HDevelop suggests some reasonable operators to be executed following the operator you are currently looking at For example thresholding might be a good idea after applying an edge filter In our example you have just created the input image Naturally this is a very unspecific sit uation with lots of different opportunities to continue However we will accept one of the successor suggestions the threshold operator later on 3 Finding the Right Parameter Values Once you
78. gt button on your keyboard and clicking in the left column beside of the program line with the left mouse button e Select the new operator using the Operator menu or type its name in the operator win dow s text field Now the new operator is displayed in the operator window Provide or adapt the input parame ters and if desired change the names of the output variables Then click Enter to insert the operator as a new program line If you click on Ok instead the operator is not only inserted but also executed immediately Finally if you click on Apply the operator is not inserted into the program but only executed This allows you to test the effect of your parameter settings very quickly and conveniently To execute an arbitrary line of a HALCON program you have to position the program counter PC at this line just click at the left column beside the line Then press the Step icon in the main window tool bar If you press Run instead all subsequent lines will be executed until a breakpoint or a stop command is encountered A single click on a program line selects this line a double click transfers the line back to the operator window Once you have finished the program you can save it and load it again later or you might export it as C C or COM code to generate a standalone application see File gt Save as These basic steps will be used many times during the example session So you will have many opportunities to
79. gures 2 3 and 2 4 show examples for different types of license files for nodelocked licenses an example file for a floating license can be found in the following section The lines starting with FEATURE are called license keys As you can see they contain the version number of HALCON in the example files 6 1 However a license 1s not exclusively bound to this release First a license 1s downward compatible 1 e a license for HALCON 6 1 is also valid for HALCON 6 0 Secondly a license 1s upward compatible within a version number 1 e licenses for HALCON 6 1 are also valid for HALCON 6 1 1 If you upgrade to a newer version however you need corresponding upgrade license keys lines starting with UPGRADE figure 2 5 depicts an example for upgrading a license from HALCON 6 0 to HALCON 6 1 Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 3 LICENSING 23 2 3 4 Using Floating Licenses The previous sections already mentioned some issues concerning the use of floating licenses First you must select one computer in your network which is to act as the license server 1 e watch over the number of HALCON licenses currently used on this computer a special program called the license manager daemon must be installed and started see the sections below Secondly the license file supplied by your distributor must be copied to all computers you installed HALCON on 1 e not only those you want to use HALCON on but also the license server Note that if
80. have selected an operator from the menu by typing it s name or by double clicking on a program line in the program window it is displayed in the operator window Now you have to specify the parameters for the operator Of course you can type in every parameter manually either a control value or a variable name In many cases it is more convenient to use the combo boxes click on the arrow at the right side of the parameter field instead which provide a listing of meaningful values or names of variables you specified within your program Furthermore for control input parameters default values are provided by HDevelop For example apply a threshold operator to the input image by selecting the operator threshold from Operators gt Segmentation Specify the input image Die using the combo box If you use the default values for the lower and upper threshold all pixels in the input image with gray values larger than 128 will be included in the resulting output region Therefore you could call the corresponding output variable BrightRegion It might be helpful to set the visualization mode Visualization gt Draw to fill In this case you see all the selected image pixels painted in the current drawing color in the graphics window Double click on Die and BrightRegion again to underlay the visualization of the region with the original image see figure 3 7 To choose another parameter value just double click on the program line containing th
81. he running HDevelop program Activate Activates the lines selected in the program Deactivate Deactivates the lines selected in the program Reset Resets the program into its initial state and clears all variables Gray value inspection Opens the window for gray value inspection Zooming Opens the online zooming window Gray value histogram Opens the interactive gray value histogram Feature histogram Opens the interactive region XLD feature histogram Region inspection Opens the interactive region feature inspection window 3 1 2 Program Window This window is used to display a HDevelop program This might be an entire program which has been loaded or single operators only It has two parts The left area contains marks which control the running of a HDevelop program In the initial HDevelop state you will see the program counter PC represented by a green arrow and the insertion cursor represented by a gt Additionally you may set a break point during program debugging see the user HDevelop User s Manual for a detailed explanation The right area contains the program code It is empty in the initial state 3 1 3 Operator Window This window will show you important information about a chosen operator It indicates all parameter names their types and their values It supports you in specifying a parameter value by displaying a default value and alternative values Additionally you may get online help for each operator Anot
82. her window element is the text field If you are not quite sure about an operator name you may specify a substring in this text field In this case the system is going to search for all operators in its operator base which include this substring They are displayed in a combo box where you may choose the appropriate operator 3 1 4 Variable Window This is the control unit for variables generated during the execution of the program Double click on a variable to display its value If the variable corresponds to an image or a set of regions iconic variable the contained objects are displayed in the Graphics Window Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 2 EDITING A HDEVELOP PROGRAM 39 3 1 5 Graphics Window This window is used to display iconic variables The visualization modes can be adapted to your needs with the functions provided in the Visualization menu You may open an arbitrary number of graphics windows Each window can be activated interactively or accessed using its specific window ID 3 2 Editing a HDevelop Program After starting HDevelop the tool waits for your input You create an application in other words write your HDevelop program by adding lines in the Program Window To add a new line 1 e a new operator you have to perform two steps e Position the insertion cursor gt on the appropriate line of the program where you would like to insert the new line This cursor 1s placed by pressing the lt Shift
83. iew of real time applications the exact duration of this delay is unknown as it may lie between zero and the time needed for one frame Summarizing in applications with hard real time constraints external triggers should be used in conjunction with an asynchronously resetable camera and the asynchronous grabbing mode 4 3 3 Volatile Image Grabbing By default the operators grab_image and grab_image_async copy the image data written by the frame grabber into a certain memory area into a HALCON image object The advantage of this mode is that your application can process the returned image object as long as it likes without it being overwritten by a subsequent grab Furthermore the application can keep a history of images if necessary As copying costs processing time typically about 2 3ms for a NTSC image which might be precious in a real time application some HALCON frame grabber interfaces offer the so called volatile grabbing mode In this mode the frame grabber directly writes the image data into a HALCON image object used by the application Thus no copying is required The drawback of this mode is that older images will be overwritten by subsequent grabs thus the name volatile Whether a frame grabber interface supports volatile grabbing is noted in its online documenta tion 2In fact the HALCON frame grabber interfaces internally use a so called double buffering strategy to assure that a HALCON application c
84. in Borland Delphi gt fg integration Example programs for frame grabber interfaces see also the Frame Grabber Integration Programmer s Manual gt extension_package The example user package halconuser see also the Extension Package Programmer s Manual gt hdevelop Examples for using HDevelop together with the example pro grams described in the manual Getting Started with HALCON subdirectory Manuals Getting Started and in the HDevelop User s Manual subdirectory Manuals HDevelop gt Mic Examples for using HALCON together with MFC see also the HALCON C User s Manual and the HALCON COM User s Manual gt motif Examples for using HALCON together with Motif see also the HALCON C User s Manual gt vb Examples for using HALCON within Visual Basic together with the example programs described in the HALCON COM User s Manual gt vb net Examples for using HALCON within Visual Basic NET see also the HALCON COM User s Manual Please note that the examples should not be used directly for two reasons First on most platforms only the user who installed HALCON 1s allowed to save a modified example program More importantly on some operating systems not all users have the permission HALCON 6 1 4 14 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION to create new files in the example subdirectories this causes errors in those example pro grams which contain operators that write data
85. ing licenses please note the following After installing HALCON on the computer acting as the license server for the first time you must install and start the license manager daemon as described in section 2 3 4 2 If you update from an HALCON 6 1 or 6 1 1 to HALCON 6 1 2 or 6 1 3 you must restart the license manager daemon see section 2 3 4 3 for detailed information 2 1 3 Updating HALCON Windows NT 2000 XP only For Windows NT 2000 XP systems there is a special mechanism which lets you up date HALCON to a newer maintenance release of the same version e g from HAL CON 6 1 to HALCON 6 1 1 or 6 1 3 Please refer to the HALCON download area http www mvtec com halcon download for more details Special Information for Users of Floating Licenses If you are using floating licenses please note the following Before extracting the ZIP file on the computer acting as the license server you must stop the license manager daemon as described in section 2 3 4 1 Otherwise you will get an error message during the extraction because the two files mvtecd exe and lmgrd exe cannot be replaced while the daemon is running In this case stop the daemon and repeat the extraction After the extraction you must restart the license manager daemon see section 2 3 4 3 2 1 4 The Installed File Structure Let s take a look at the installed file structure in the directory XHALCONROOT In the following the most important directories and files are de
86. installed HALCON to a directory like C Program Files MVTec HALCON you will have to use the short path C Progra 1 MVTec HALCON instead You can query short path names as follows Open a Windows Command Prompt change into the directory that contains the directory or file whose short name is searched for here C and then type dir x Note that the daemon mvtecd opens a second port By default this port is selected by the operating system and thus its number can change Especially when using a firewall you might need to specify the port number explicitly For this append the string port number to the line starting with DAEMON for example as follows DAEMON mvtecd C Progra 1 MVTec HALCON FLEXlm i586 nt4 mvtecd port 28000 Finally you have to make sure that the license manager daemon is installed and started success fully 2 3 4 1 Un installing the License Manager Daemon Under Windows NT 2000 XP On Windows NT 2000 XP systems you can let the setup program install the license manager daemon which will then be started automatically at boot time as the system service HALCON Licenses To check whether the daemon was installed successfully open the Windows dialog show ing the state of the installed services Under Windows NT this dialog can be opened via Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Services under Windows 2000 and Windows XP via Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Administrative Tools gt Component Ser
87. ion of an image analysis problem consists J 2 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING HALCON of a combination of several HALCON operators This concept allows much greater flex1bility than others based on fewer but more complex operators that are specialized to perform a certain task Specialized operators are only suitable for special tasks and become worthless when the task changes In contrast to this HALCON operators may be used in any combination Among the great number of operators there are some that implement the same task by different algorithms This allows to vary how fast and precisely a task 1s performed Consider pattern matching for example For a task where only the rough positions of matching points are needed but where the results must be returned as fast as possible the operator fast_match may be used In contrast to this best_match is the better choice when needing the exact positions even with subpixel accuracy by using a more time consuming algorithm O HALCON processes color and multi channel images HALCON works on all kinds of image data binary monochrome color or multi channel images You may use all these kinds of images in the same manner Multi channel images are useful to work on images that were acquired by a multisensor system O HALCON implements efficient fast region processing This speeds up the processing and eases the handling of regions Regions may overlap and can be of any size They are stored by
88. ister A possible cause for this may be that the Mi crosoft library at1 d11 was not registered properly This library resides in the directory hSystemRoot system32 e g C WINNT system32 To register the library open a Windows Command Prompt change into the directory misc i586 nt4 on the CD and execute the supplied program reg_halconx twice as follows reg_halconx atl dll reg_halconx The first call of reg_halconx registers at1 d11 the second one registers halconx d11 As an alternative to the Command Prompt you can use the dialog Start gt Run here you must either type the full path of the program reg_halconx or select the program via the button Browse e Installing and uninstalling the license manager daemon Occasionally the FLEXIm license manager daemon needed for floating licenses is not installed properly by the HALCON setup How to install the license manager daemon manually 1s described in section 2 3 4 1 6 5 2 Problems During Uninstallation e Unregistration of halconx dll If you had to register the HALCON COM interface library halconx d11 manually as described in section 6 5 1 you must unregister it manually before you can uninstall HAL CON To do so insert a HALCON CD then open a Windows Command Prompt change into the directory misc i586 nt4 on the CD and execute the supplied program reg_halconx as follows reg_halconx u As an alternative to the Command Prompt open the dialog Start gt Run select the pro
89. le1 draw_region ROI WindowID To adapt the program in this way you may select the line draw_rectangle1 just click on that line and deactivate it with Edit gt Deactivate Do the same with the line gen_rectanglel e Computation of a suitable ROI The computation of a suitable ROI based on intermediate results of the image analysis is the most challenging but also the most flexible approach In our example we will detect the board itself and use this as a ROI for the ball detection see section 3 8 Once you have generated a ROI you can reduce the image domain to this region with the oper ator reduce_domain from Operators gt Image gt Domain Specify Die as input image and ROI as input region reduce_domain Die ROI ImageReduced mean_image ImageReduced ImageMean 11 11 The resulting image ImageReduced is only defined within the ROI Clear the window and double click on the variable ImageReduced to see this effect You might apply a couple of operators to the original image and the reduced image to see the increase in performance For example try mean_image from Operators gt Filter gt Smoothing with Die as input image Then clear the window and double click on the mean_image program line to change the input image to ImageReduced To repeat the above sequence with different ROIs just place the PC on draw_rectangle1 or draw_region depending on which method you have activated and press Run In order to stop the execution
90. lpful in many areas of application since they enable you to work with sets of images regions or control data With HALCON tuples of objects or control values can be handled just as one object Operators can either work on a single or on a tuple object You need not bother about the amount of elements within a tuple You simply pass one variable containing the tuple to an operator HALCON decomposes it Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 1 1 FACTS ABOUT HALCON 3 and works simultaneously on the tuple elements O0 HALCON is based on an efficient management of image and data objects The HALCON memory management uses fast efficient algorithms to speed up image processing It provides mechanisms for controlled memory access and services for de bugging such as checking with every deallocation whether any write access exceeded the allocated memory block The HALCON image database provides several services for object handling to allow a fast and transparent access to image data Images are held in memory To reduce memory costs data 1s shared by different objects whenever possible O HALCON provides interfaces to the programming languages C C and COM The HALCON system includes interfaces to the programming languages C C and COM This allows you to use HALCON operators inside your own C C or COM programs and to build stand alone applications O HALCON provides the tool HDevelop for interactive development of image analy
91. m manual htm Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 3 LICENSING 19 About HDevelop E fe N L Elena HDevelop Version 3 2 MYT ec Software GmbH Munich Germany wi my tec com 1996 2002 MYT ec Software GmbH The hostids of this computer are network card ID _ 00e02958836a 0003 C1DE 01 C3 E 9F FLEXID 36c79bd dongle ID CPU ID Figure 2 1 Identifying information in the HDevelop window About To obtain a license based on a network card or a Pentium III CPU send the corresponding ID to your local distributor together with the hostname of this machine in your network for example halconserver In the case of a dongle license this is not necessary as you will receive the license file already together with the dongle If HDevelop fails to detect any host IDs although your computer does have a network card a Pentium III or a dongle please try to extract the host IDs manually as described in the fol lowing section If IDs like ffffffff 0 or appear please consult section 6 5 3 for troubleshooting 2 3 1 2 Extracting Information Using lmhostid As a more tedious alternative you can extract these IDs by using the program lmhostid shipped together with the license manager FLEXIm Under Windows NT 2000 XP open a Windows Command Prompt Under UNIX open a shell change into the directory HALCONROOT FLEX1m and then into the subdirectory corresponding to your operating system e g i58
92. n two ways When you start HALCON on an arbitrary computer in your network it uses the host name and the port number to locate and contact the license server On the computer acting as the license server the port number is used when starting and configuring the license manager daemon Therefore it is very important that this line is identical in all copies of the license file in your network Depending on where you have installed HALCON on the computer acting as the li cense server you may have to customize the path to the daemon mvtecd which is in charge of managing the HALCON licenses Normally the path will be TATE ETE ETE TE SEDERE MVTec Software GmbH ID 00e02958e3b6 TEMS ESE RR REESE SERVER halconserver 00e02953e3b6 27000 DAEMON mvtecd C Progra 1 MVTec HALCON FLEXlm i586 nt4 mvtecd FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 1 01 jan 0000 1 1CBD8604021DC9DBC868 VENDOR_STRING 65535 ck 43 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 1 01 jan 0000 1 4C2DB644BC603179E58F VENDOR_STRING 65535 ck 80 Figure 2 6 Floating license bound to network card HALCON 6 1 4 24 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION HALCONROOTA FLEXlm 4XARCHITECTURE mvtecd see section 2 4 for information about the environment variable ARCHITECTURE However since you cannot use environment variables in the license file you must supply this path manually Note that paths including blanks are not handled properly under Windows NT 2000 XP Thus if you have
93. n HDevelop notation set_spy mode on Alternatively you can activate HALCON Spy for an already linked program by defining the environment variable XHALCONSPY 1 e by setting it to any value How to set environment variables is described in section 2 4 You specify the monitoring mode by calling the operator set_spy again with a pair of parame ters for example set_spy operator on set_spy input_control on to be informed about all operator calls and the names and values of input control parameters The monitoring mode can also be specified via the environment variable XHALCONSPY Under Windows NT 2000 XP set HALCONSPY to the value operator on input_control on to get the same mode as in the example above Under UNIX use a colon instead of a semicolon to separate options Please take a look at the entry for set_spy in the HALCON Reference Manuals for detailed information on all the debugging options Note that HALCON Spy does not work properly under Parallel HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 6 5 TROUBLESHOOTING 73 6 5 Troubleshooting This section offers help for problems encountered during installing or uninstalling HALCON when using HDevelop or when using Parallel HALCON 6 5 1 Problems During Installation e Registration of halconx d11 failed On some systems you might get a warning message that the HALCON COM interface library halconx d11 failed to self reg
94. ncy or Automatic Parallelization You can switch off parts of the features of Parallel HALCON with the help of the operator set_system To switch off the automatic parallelization mechanism call HDevelop notation see the Reference Manual for more information set_system parallelize_operators false y p p To switch of reentrancy call set_system reentrant false Of course you can switch on both behaviors again by calling set_system with the true as the second parameter Please note that by switching off reentrancy you also switch off automatic parallelization as it requires reentrancy Switch off these features only if you are sure you don t need them but want to save the corre sponding computing overhead If you write sequential programs to be run on a single processor computer the best way to save overhead is to use standard HALCON of course A reason for switching off the automatic parallelization mechanism could be for debugging or if your multithreaded program does its own scheduling and does not want Parallel HALCON to interfere via automatic parallelization Note that you do not need to switch off automatic par allelization when using Parallel HALCON on a single processor computer Parallel HALCON does not create any corresponding overhead if it detects only one processor 5 3 2 Using a Frame Grabber in Parallel HALCON All frame grabbers supported by HALCON can be used in Parallel HALCON as
95. nder Windows NT 2000 XP you need the libraries parhalconc dll parhalconcpp dll or parhalconx dl1 depending on the used pro gramming language Under UNIX you need the library libhalcon so and depend ing on the used programming language libparhalconc so or libparhalconcpp so Please consult the HALCON C User s Manual the HALCON C User s Manual or the HALCON COM User s Manual respectively for more detailed information 5 1 Automatic Parallelization If Parallel HALCON is used on multi processor hardware it will automatically parallelize im age processing operators Section 5 1 1 describes how to initialize Parallel HALCON in order to 65 66 CHAPTER 5 USING PARALLEL HALCON use this mechanism Section 5 1 2 explains the different methods which are used by HALCON operators for their automatic parallelization 5 1 1 Initializing Parallel HALCON In order to adapt the parallelization mechanism optimally to the actual hardware Parallel HAL CON needs to examine this hardware once Afterwards HALCON programs will be automat ically parallelized without needing any further action on your part Even existing HALCON programs will run and be parallelized without needing to be changed You trigger this initial examination by calling the operator check_par_hw_potential see the corresponding entry in the HALCON Reference Manuals for further information Note that this operator will only work correctly if called from Parallel HAL
96. nfo Please note that the operator check_par_hw_potential returns without an error if it cannot store the extracted information In contrast the program hcheck_parallel checks privileges and writing permissions beforehand and returns with a corresponding error message 5 1 2 The Three Methods of Automatic Parallelization For the automatic parallelization of operators Parallel HALCON exploits data parallelism i e the property that parts of the input data of an operator can be processed independently of each other Data parallelism can be found at three levels 1 tuple level If an operator is called with iconic input parameters containing tuples 1 e arrays of images regions or XLDs it can be parallelized by distributing the tuple elements 1 e the individual images regions or XLDs on parallel threads This method requires that all input parameters contain the same number of tuple elements or contain a single iconic object or value Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 5 2 PARALLEL PROGRAMMING 67 2 channel level If an operator is called with input images containing multiple channels it can be par allelized by distributing the channels on parallel threads This method requires that all input image objects contain the same number of channels or a single channel image 3 domain level Every operator can be parallelized by dividing its domain and distributing its parts on parallel threads The description of a HALCON
97. ntain not only single objects but also tuples of objects Most HALCON operators accept such tuples as input and perform their task simultanously on all the contained objects Due to this mechanism you won t have to program loops to process objects one by one in most situations Based on the circular shape of balls the elimination of the rectangular region is now very simple Just apply the select_shape operator in Operators gt Regions gt Features with circularity as the selection criterion select_shape Balls FinalBalls circularity and 0 85 1 0 Double click on the variable Die then on FinalBalls to see the selected regions only Note again that Balls contains seven objects from which you select all circular regions with this single operator call Now the ball segmentation is finished In the next section it will be shown how to perform measurements based on the segmentation result But before continuing recall how simple it was to detect the balls and handle all the intermediate iconic objects generated read_image Die die3 threshold Die BrightRegion 128 255 shape_trans BrightRegion ROI rectangle2 reduce_domain Die ROI DieROI threshold DieROI RawSegmentation 0 50 fill_up_shape RawSegmentation Wires area 1 100 opening_circle Wires BallRegion 15 5 connection BallRegion Balls select_shape Balls FinalBalls circularity and 0 85 1 0 3 1
98. o obtain and install a license will be given The first step 1s of course to select the computer on which in case of a nodelocked license you want to use HALCON on or which in case of a floating license 1s to act as the license server 1 e which keeps track of how many licenses of HALCON are currently in use Note that a computer need not be a server in the sense that they have to be a big server machine or have a special kind of operating system e g Windows NT Server installed If you want to run HALCON on a stand alone computer the license server must be this computer If you run HALCON on a network any computer on the network can serve as a license server In order to obtain a license for HALCON you have to extract identifying information about this computer see section 2 3 1 for more details and send it to your local distributor If you want to obtain a runtime license you have to inform your local distributor which HALCON modules you want to use Please refer to section 2 3 2 for more information You will then receive a license file Section 2 3 3 describes how to install this file on your system Section 2 3 4 contains additional information for the case you want to use a floating license 2 3 1 Extracting Identifying Information The standard method for identifying an computer requires that the computer of your choice 1s equipped with a network card If you are using Windows NT 2000 XP and if your computer is equi
99. obahn dev under the path XHALCONROOT examples hdevelop Applications Sequences 4 2 3 Region Objects Regions define areas in images e g the domain of an image or the light areas of an image Region objects consist of one or more regions They are handled as separate objects independent from any image object although they may represent an area within a specific image This allows to use flexible shapes and sizes for regions and to store them efficiently Only the region area must be represented in memory independent from the gray values of the pixels Moreover this allows to define overlapping regions for the same image without the implicit merging that would happen when storing regions as matrices Region data is represented by a special variant of the runlength encoding by a chord encod ing for every line chord of a region its row index y coordinate of chord line number and HALCON 6 1 4 58 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON tuple image object image object 1 image object 2 p domain channel 1 channel 2 Re E GHA VIME E E E E E AE E E A A runlength gray cao gray value encoding matrix matrix Figure 4 2 Structure of HALCON image objects regions may contain holes regions may be compact N regions may consist of regions may exceed several unconnected areas the image size Figure 4 3 Different forms and sizes of regions the x coordinates of
100. of the program before a specific operator is applied place a break point BP in the program line containing this operator Control key and mouse click in the left column HALCON 6 1 4 44 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP 3 6 Finding the Right Operator You have created your first HALCON object the original image But how to continue There are about 1000 operators to choose from Naturally the selection of a suitable operator sequence depends on the image analysis task you have to solve In general it 1s up to your experience and image analysis knowledge to make the right selection However HDevelop supports you in many ways during this program development The HALCON operators are hierarchically structured Just browse the Operators menu to get a first Impression Operator Iof x Operator thresh v auto_threshold histo_to_thresh hysteresis_threshold threshold threshold_sub_pix number real number real Figure 3 6 Selecting the threshold operator using the substring thresh Again if you already know at least a substring of the operator name you might also just type this string in the operator window s text field If there 1s an ambiguity you choose the operator inside the combo box see figure 3 6 For each HALCON operator HDevelop s online help provides an HTML description Just select Help gt HTML to start your default browser You will see the table of contents of all image anal
101. ograms which are necessary if you want to use a dongle license Section 2 3 5 provides detailed information about dongle drivers including how to install them manually if you didn t let HALCON do it The next dialog asks whether the computer is to act as the floating license server In this case the setup program installs the so called license manager daemon a system service that manages your floating licenses Note that when using floating licenses you need to install the license manager daemon only on one computer the license server Please refer to section 2 3 4 for more information about floating licenses e g how to install the license manager daemon manually After some further questions the actual installation starts 2 1 2 Installing HALCON Under UNIX To install HALCON on UNIX systems mount the CD e g on the directory cdrom On most systems you need root rights to do so Note that on some systems most notably Linux the default mount entry usually in etc fstab does not allow user to execute programs on a CD In such cases you have to mount the CD explicitly with a command similar to the following mount dev cdrom cdrom For the installation start the shell script install unix which is located in the top level di rectory of the CD This script will ask you in which directory you want to install HALCON Please note that if you choose Typical most of the image sequences are not installed This means that example
102. ome basic image processing aspects The manual is divided into the following chapters e Introducing HALCON This chapter provides a short overview of the HALCON system and points out additional sources of information about HALCON e Installation Licensing Configuration This chapter explains how to install and configure HALCON Furthermore it describes the different types of licenses and how to obtain them e A First Look at HDevelop This chapter contains a complete HDevelop session showing how to solve a specific image analysis task from the scratch e Philosophy of HALCON This chapter explains the basic data structures and mechanisms of HALCON e Using Parallel HALCON This chapter shows how to use Parallel HALCON e Tips and Tricks This chapter contains helpful information e g for troubleshooting Consult your platform s documentation for general information Release Notes Please note the latest updates of this manual Edition 6c HALCON 6 1 3 April 2004 The manual now warns that after updating to a maintenance release that uses a newer version of the FLEXIm license manager software you must restart the license manager daemon Edition 6b HALCON 6 1 2 May 2003 The manual now uses the terms license license file license key and update upgrade consistently Furthermore it warns that the number of modules should be determined in the actually used environment and describes how to customize th
103. ome operators can only be called exclusively because of functional or technical reasons See section 5 2 1 for more information HALCON 6 1 4 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING HALCON The degree of parallelization is optimized online to minimize the parallelization overhead For example very small images will not be processed in parallel as the overhead would surpass the parallelization speed up Moreover not all HALCON operators lend themselves to paralleliza tion To be able to exploit your multi processor hardware optimally Parallel HALCON has to check the hardware once after being installed Section 5 1 1 describes how to start and configure this initialization Note that Parallel HALCON is designed for shared memory systems 1 e systems in which multiple processors share a common memory as it is the case for typical multi processor boards The main reason is that only in a shared memory system threads can share the HALCON object database and do not need to copy images This limitation means that Parallel HALCON is not suited to the use on workstation clusters or other multi processor hardware that does not offer shared memory Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 1 4 ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION 7 1 4 Additional Sources of Information For further information you may consult the following manuals HDevelop User s Manual An introduction to the graphical development environment of the HALCON system HALCON C User s Manual
104. ontrol Constructs 2 Philosophy of HALCON di Mod lar Scie ii ERR ERE ES ESS 4 2 Handling Iconic and Control Data 0 004 4 2 1 Tuple Processing 2 2 eee ee All Image OWES cus en eA EHS EKER DEDEDE OTRO 4203 KRepion UDJecis s soa kee we eee eee eee eee ww we eS 4 24 XLD Objects gt i be e Ee be ee ee he a 4 3 The HALCON Frame Grabber Interface 4 3 1 The Two Modes of Grabbing Images 4 3 2 Using External Triggers 2 0 00 0 00008 4 3 3 Volatile Image Grabbing 2 0004 4 3 4 Using Frame Grabbers Without a HALCON Interface 4 4 Limitations ee ww bee eRe Rae Re OR BR Rw A ee Using Parallel HALCON 5 1 Automatic Parallelization 0 0 0 2 eee ee ee ee 5 1 1 Initializing Parallel HALCON 00 5 1 2 The Three Methods of Automatic Parallelization 5 2 Parallel Programming i eeeh 5 2 1 A Closer Look at Reentrancy Lili di e RG iii eh 5 3 Additional Information on Parallel HALCON 2 5 3 1 How to Switch Off Reentrancy or Automatic Parallelization 5 3 2 Using a Frame Grabber in Parallel HALCON 5 3 3 Extension Packages and Parallel HALCON 5 3 4 Parallel HALCON and HALCON Spy Tips and Tricks 6 1 News About HALCON 0 20 0 0 2 2 eee ee ee ee 6 2 A Note on Windows 2000 and Windows XP
105. operator in the Reference Manuals contains an entry called Parallelization Information which specifies its behavior when using Parallel HALCON This entry indicates whether the operator will be automatically parallelized by Parallel HALCON and by which method tuple channel or domain 5 2 Parallel Programming Using Parallel HALCON Parallel HALCON supports parallel programming by being thread safe and reentrant 1 e dif ferent threads can call HALCON operators simultaneously without having to wait However not all operators are fully reentrant This section takes a closer look at the reentrancy of Parallel HALCON Furthermore it points out issues that should be kept in mind when writing parallel programs that use Parallel HALCON The example program example_multithreaded1 c in the directory example c shows how to use multithreading to extract different types of components on a board in parallel using Parallel HALCON C 5 2 1 A Closer Look at Reentrancy In fact there are different levels of reentrancy for HALCON operators l reentrant An operator is fully reentrant if it can be called by multiple threads simultaneously independent of the data it is called with 2 local This level of reentrancy is only relevant under Windows NT 2000 XP Under Windows NT 2000 XP operators marked as local should be called only from the main thread and not from an external thread Typical examples are operators that use graphical I O
106. operators in parallel in a multithreaded program you have to call one operator exclusively This is necessary to allow HALCON to initialize internal structures In principle you can choose any HALCON operator for this initial call we recommend reset_obj_db as this operator initializes the global image size e I O Under Windows NT 2000 XP use I O operators including graphics operators like open_window or disp_image only in the main thread otherwise you might get a dead lock This means that you should not open a window in one thread and request a user interaction in it from another thread In the Reference Manual these operators are marked as locally reentrant see section 5 2 1 Keep in mind that operators which create or delete files work exclusively 1 e other threads have to wait Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 5 3 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON PARALLEL HALCON 69 The programmer has to assure that threads do not access the same file or handle simul tanously e Multithreading vs Automatic Parallelization If you explicitely balance the load on multiple processors in a multithreaded program we recommend to switch off the automatic parallelization mechanism in order to get an optimal performance How to switch of the automatic parallelization is described in section 5 3 1 5 3 Additional Information This section contains additional information that helps you to use Parallel HALCON 5 3 1 Howto Switch Off Reentra
107. package halconuser Prior to installing a new HALCON version e g HALCON 6 1 x over HALCON 6 0 x you should uninstall any existing old version Under Windows this is especially important in order to clean up the registry See section 2 2 about how to uninstall HALCON An exception to this rule is if you are using ActivVisionTools 1 0 to 1 3 and want to install HALCON 6 1 x In this case you must keep your old HALCON 6 0 x installation If you want to install a new maintenance release over an existing release based on the same version e g HALCON 6 1 1 over HALCON 6 1 you can use a special update mechanism see section 2 1 3 2 1 1 Installing HALCON Under Windows NT 2000 XP To install HALCON on Windows NT 2000 XP systems simply insert the CD This should automatically start the setup program If the setup program doesn t start automatically execute the Setup exe program located in the directory nt x86 of the CD Please note that you need administrator privileges in order to install HALCON First the setup program checks whether your system meets the requirements for running HAL CON see section 1 2 Then it checks whether HALCON 1s already installed on your computer and if yes which release is installed e same release If you already installed the same release the setup determines the installed components and lets you install additional parts e same version If you already installed another release of the same version e
108. perator threshold Die BrightRegion 128 255 shape_trans BrightRegion ROI rectangle2 reduce_domain Die ROI DieROI The following computations will be performed only on the resulting image DieROI within the board 3 9 Finding Bonding Balls Using Morphology If you look closer at your image you will notice that the bonding balls to detect are darker than the die itself Therefore another thresholding might be suitable as the next operation see figure 3 8 Due to noise the resulting region all the dark parts within the board might have Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 9 FINDING BONDING BALLS USING MORPHOLOGY 47 Figure 3 8 The region object RawSegmentation containing all dark pixels within the board some small holes which can obstruct further processing For a controlled filling up of these arti facts the HALCON operator fill_up_shape in Operators gt Regions gt Transformation is suitable threshold DieROI RawSegmentation 0 50 fill_up_shape RawSegmentation Wires area 1 100 Visualize the variables Wires and RawSegmentation then change the drawing color to see the difference a ee ee er ZA gt ini 3 oT f a re e 1 gt 24 ha gt Sat i j nu Figure 3 9 Removing faulty parts of the raw segmentation with the opening_circle operation Unfortunately the region found so far contains not only the bonding balls but also some darker areas especially the wi
109. pped with a Pentium III processor it can be identified by the so called CPU ID as well Under Windows NT 2000 XP you can also use a hardware dongle In this case the license will be coupled to this dongle 1 e you can use HALCON on another computer by moving the dongle This has the advantage that you don t commit yourself to using a certain computer You can use dongles both for nodelocked and for floating licenses In the latter case the dongle 1s used for identifying the computer which acts as the license server You can obtain such a dongle from your local distributor The dongle will be delivered together with the corresponding license file See section 2 3 5 for more information regarding the use of dongles 2 3 1 1 Extracting Information Using HDevelop The easiest method to extract identifying information is to start the HDevelop demo version which is always installed You start it under Windows NT 2000 XP call Start gt Programs gt MVTec HALCON gt HDevelop Demo under UNIX call hdevelop_demo from a shell Now select the menu item Help gt About A dialog as depicted in figure 2 1 appears At the bottom it shows all the information available on your computer in the example the three so called host IDs corresponding to a network card a Pentium III and a dongle In most cases you will see only one ID 2The full documentation of FLEXIm can be obtained from the FLEXIm end user manual available at http www globetrotter co
110. programs based on such an image sequence cannot be run A quick remedy in such a case is to mount the HALCON CD again as the example programs also look there for the images Of course you can also install additional parts of HALCON at a later time HALCON 6 1 4 12 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION the environment variable HALCONROOT has to be set to this directory later see section 2 4 2 Furthermore the script asks whether to install various components of HALCON Since all directories and files on the CD are read only you may get some warnings about changed permissions if you run the installation script as an ordinary user as root no warnings of this kind should appear Furthermore on some systems you may get complaints about the fact that the CD contains files with file names longer than 32 characters Note that the installation script checks whether your system meets the requirements for running HALCON see section 1 2 After the installation several environment variables need to be set in order for HALCON to work See section 2 4 2 for details Note that you can install additional parts of HALCON at any time by mounting the CD again and copying the corresponding directories and files to the diectory where you installed HAL CON To copy directories open a shell change into the root directory on the CD and type tar cf lt directory_to_be_copied gt cd HALCONROOT tar xf If you are using float
111. quentially it cannot be used to monitor a Parallel HALCON program see section 2 1 4 for the file structure of HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Chapter 6 Tips and Tricks This chapter contains information that helps you working with HALCON including sections on troubleshooting 6 1 News About HALCON If you select HDevelop s menu entry Help gt HALCON News WWW you can check for the latest news about HALCON on MVTec s WWW server e g whether new extension packages frame grabber interfaces or HALCON versions are available 6 2 A Note on Windows 2000 and Windows XP By default Windows 2000 and Windows XP use visual effects e g when opening menus that as a side effect slow down programs with graphics output In the context of HALCON especially HDevelop is affected significantly We therefore recommend to disable these effects in the dialog Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Display 6 3 Online Help in HDevelop HDevelop offers you a broad range of support e System suggestions Based on the operator knowledge base the system offers specific advice to choose an appropriate operator Thus there are suggestions for reasonable predecessors and suc cessors If you are searching for different ways of solving an image analysis problem you may have a look at alternatives or references of an operator If you only have some keywords or thematic aspects in mind which an operator has to fulfill but you
112. r info_framegrabber grab_image and grab_image_async grab an image from a specified frame grabber For the difference between the two modes of grabbing see below grab_image_start starts an asynchronous grabbing from the specified frame grabber see below for more details close_framegrabber and close_all_framegrabbers close the connection to one or all frame grabbers and release the corresponding resources e g free the previously allo cated memory set_framegrabber_lut and get_framegrabber_lut allow to set or read a frame grabber specific lookup table These operators are only supported by some frame grabbers Please refer to http www mvtec com halcon framegrabber for an up to date list Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 4 3 THE HALCON FRAME GRABBER INTERFACE 61 If you successfully installed your frame grabber all you need to do to access it from HALCON is to call the operator open_framegrabber specifying the name of the frame grabber and some additional information e g regarding the connected camera Then images can be grabbed by calling the operator grab_image or grab_image_async see below Please note that the HALCON frame grabber interfaces may change more often than the HAL CON library itself One reason is that MVTec continuously develops new interfaces further more if the software provided by the frame grabber manufacturers changes e g if new fea tures are integrated the corresponding HALCON int
113. r own frame grabber or to download new releases of frame grabber interfaces via the internet for fast and easy update without further changes of the rest of the system The next module is the Language Independent Operator Interface It contains modules for calling operators handling the input output and passing data objects to the host language An operator call is performed by the Language Interface which is generated automatically by a compiler using the information in the operator database There are three language inter faces HALCON C allows to access HALCON operators within the programming language C HALCON C within C and HALCON COM Windows NT 2000 XP only within pro gramming languages or environments that support COM e g Microsoft Visual Basic C or Borland Delphi Note that you can also use HALCON COM within Visual C programs but then you cannot use HALCON C in the same program because only one HALCON lan guage interface can be used in a single application be it directly or indirectly e g by including a DLL that uses a second interface HDevelop 1s implemented on top of the language interface using the language interface HAL CON C and the GUI toolkit wxWindows developed by the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at The University of Edinburgh to get a portable user interface for Windows and UNIX 4 2 Handling Iconic and Control Data HALCON distinguishes two types of data iconic data and control data
114. r you create another type of HALCON object a region see section 4 2 3 Yariable Watch FA a Es Iconic Variables gt 3604 975 2995 9 395 5 665 5 Figure 3 5 The variable window containing iconic and control variables Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 5 CREATING A REGION OF INTEREST ROI 43 The default visualization for a region 1s the shape of the region here the rectangle drawn with the current color into the graphics window You may manipulate this graphics out put by choosing items of the menu Visualization or executing the corresponding HDe velop operator dev_ For example set the drawing color to green with Visualization gt Color increase the line with for drawing to 3 pixels with Visualization gt Line Width and specify that only the region boundary margin instead of the whole region fill should be displayed with Visualization gt Draw Each time you change the visu alization the last iconic object that was drawn into the currently active graphics window is redisplayed figure 3 4 Therefore you need only redisplay an object by hand by double clicking it in the variables window if you want to change the display mode of an older object e Interactive creation of an arbitrary ROI HALCON supports arbitrary regions as ROI see figure 3 4 Just use draw_region from the menu Operators gt Graphics gt Drawing instead of the sequence draw_rectanglel and gen_rectang
115. rdware The HALCON system also includes the programming environment HDevelop which allows to speed up the design of image analysis programs A smart online help based on an operator knowledge base provides information about each HALCON operator e g reasonable succes sors possible alternatives cross references etc From version 6 0 on HALCON exists in two versions Besides standard HALCON you can now choose Parallel HALCON In addition to HALCON s image processing functional ity Parallel HALCON automatically exploits multi processor hardware and supports parallel programming See section 1 3 for more information on Parallel HALCON Let s start with some facts describing the main characteristics of both HALCON versions 1 1 Facts about HALCON DO HALCON s comprehensive operator library supports efficient flexible image pro cessing and eases the development of image analysis programs HALCON s operator library contains about 1000 operators The operators can be used in any combination All HALCON applications e g HDevelop or HALCON C pro grams make use of the library to perform image processing tasks The operators exhibit a broad range of functionality from simple tasks e g read image from file to complex processes e g estimate state by Kalman filtering Basically they all have a rather lean complexity and are meant to process single steps of a task instead of the whole task So the typical solut
116. ree resolution levels and compare the execution time with the one resolution method underlying fast_match After we have derived all posible matching positions we decompose the corresponding region into connected components connection Matches BallROI HALCON 6 1 4 52 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP If you specified a reasonable template and a suitable MaxError this should result in six regions corresponding to the six fully visible balls in the image count_obj BallROI NumBalls Within each of the regions in BallROI we would like to determine the exact position of the template This can be done by another HALCON operator called best_match BallROI contains only regions Thus we have to add an image that is gray values to the objects prior to the final matching This is done with the operator add_channels in Operators gt Image gt Channel add_channels BallROI Die BallImage best_match BallImage TemplateID 20 true Row Column Error Note that the best_match operator is applied to all objects contained in BallImage Thus the control output variables Row and Column specifying the exact matching position and Error containing the matching error should be tuples of values To visualize the results we display rectangles like the one used for the template generation shifted by the offset beween the matching positions and the center of the template see figure 3 12 disp_rectangle1 WindowID Rowi Row
117. res connected to the balls Obviously the bonding balls have a circular shape We use this information to separate the bonding balls from the other dark parts by using the HALCON operator opening_circle in Operators gt Morphology gt Region This morphological operation will suppress all parts of the region where the underlying structural element a circle with a specific radius does not fit within the region see figure 3 9 HALCON 6 1 4 48 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP opening_circle Wires BallRegion 15 5 Visualize the variables Wires and BallRegion then change the drawing color to see the effect of this operation Now there is only one artifact left in the segmentation A large dark rectangular shape in which the circular mask for the opening has fitted as well In order to eliminate this error the intermediate result the region BallRegion 1s separated into connected regions via the HALCON operator connection connection BallRegion Balls Note the difference BallRegion is one region containing all the pixels of the segmentation so far The different parts of this region are not connected but still they form a single region Balls isa variable containing seven separated HALCON objects one per connected region Set Visualization gt Colored to 12 Now 12 different colors are used cyclically to paint the region objects It is a very convenient feature of the HALCON system that iconic variables can co
118. resholding In this section you will encounter a completely different approach to this detection problem The pattern matching approach can be divided into two steps 1 Creating a so called template typically during a training phase 2 Searching for this template in the current image Figure 3 11 A template for a ball In our example we will create a template containing a single ball To do this just copy the two program lines you used to generate a rectangular search space section 3 5 draw_rectangle1 WindowID Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 gen_rectanglel ROI Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 another word for the pattern that is searched in the image Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 11 FINDING BONDING BALLS USING PATTERN MATCHING 51 To do so select the two program lines copy them with Edit gt Copy position the insertion cursor at the end of the program and select Edit gt Paste Then position the PC on the draw_rectanglei command press Run and draw a small rectangle containing nothing but one of the balls see figure 3 11 Then copy the program line for reducing the image domain to the resulting region ROI reduce_domain Die ROI ImageReduced Now you can transform ImageReduced which is the original image restricted to the rectan gular domain you just have specified to a template This done by the HALCON operator create_template in Operators gt Filter gt Match create_template ImageRe
119. responding variable to Die You get a text field focus by clicking the left mouse button inside the desired text field The second parameter is the name of the image file Change it to die3 read_image Die die3 Having specified all parameters you should press Ok to transfer the operator to the program win dow and to execute it Now you have created the first line of your program in the program win dow The variable Die containing the image object you just created 1s displayed in the variable window Simultaneously the result of the operator in this case the original image is displayed in the graphics window If you encounter an error trying to load the image check whether your environment is set up correctly The image should be located in HALCONROOT images which is also the default search path for image files as long as you do not provide specific search paths in the HALCONIMAGES variable see section 2 4 Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 4 MODIFYING THE GRAPHICS WINDOW 41 3 4 Modifying the Graphics Window The size of the initial graphics window is 512 x 512 pixels If your image is bigger or smaller than this size it will therefore be displayed distortedly You can interactively change the win dow size just by picking the lower right corner with the mouse but the easiest way to see the undistorted image is to select Visualization gt Size Window gt Original This enlarges or shrinks the window to the si
120. ry HALCONROOT FLEX1m i586 nt4 HalconUninst dl1 Note that by default the Windows Explorer doesn t show DLL files unless you explicitly tell it to do so HalconUninst dll is a HALCON specific DLL for the uninstallation pro cess If this file has been removed you can get a copy of the file from the directory FLEX1m i586 nt4 on the HALCON CD Only for HALCON releases gt 6 1 In the directory C Program Files InstallShield Installation Information or similar the directory BBEC9F40 4A36 11D6 A14C 00E0296C2846 with a set of files This directory has been created during the installation If it has been removed an automatic uninstallation 1s not possible Only for HALCON releases lt 6 1 In your HALCONROOTY directory Uninst isu This file has been created during the installation If it has been removed an automatic uninstallation 1s not possible 3 Check if the registry entry for the uninstaller is set properly Start regedit exe in a Windows Command Prompt or in the dialog Start gt Run e Only for HALCON releases gt 6 1 Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt Microsoft gt Windows gt CurrentVersion gt Uninstall gt BBEC9F40 4A36 11D6 A14C 00E0296C2846 There you should find a key named UninstallString The value of this string should be something like this the option c is only included if you lFor HALCON 5 0 and 5 1 this DLL was called CSUninst d1l Getting Started with HALCON 200
121. s e HALCONROOT This 1s the most Important environment variable It designates the directory where HAL CON is installed A typical path is for example C Program Files MVTec HALCON According to this variable the system switches to subdirectories which are important for running HALCON Some of them are listed below the HALCON file structure is described in section 2 1 4 YHALCONROOT help The operator data base is situated in this directory It is accessible by all HALCON programs to obtain information about HALCON operators HALCONROOT doc html reference hdevelop HDevelop uses this directory for online help which can be displayed by a suitable HTML browser like Netscape Communicator AHALCONROOT license This directory contains the license file necessary for using HALCON HALCONROOT images If the variable HALCONIMAGES see below is not set the system looks for image files in this directory e HALCONIMAGES To search for image files specified by a relative path the system uses this environment variable As a rule it contains several directory names possibly including the CD ROM separated by semicolons e ARCHITECTURE HALCON uses this variable to differentiate between the supported platforms operating systems On a Windows NT 2000 XP system ARCHITECTUREY is set to 1586 nt4 The variable appears in different directory paths Executable HALCON programs e g hdevelop exe and DLLs e g halcon d11 reside in HA
122. s an output like gt lmhostid cpu64 lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEXIm Host LD of this machine is lmhostid FLEXlm function not available in this version lt 45 520 gt this indicates that the processor of your computer does not provide a CPU ID As described in section 2 3 1 2 the most probable reason is that the service providing the CPU ID is disabled in the computer s BIOS You can check and enable this service in the BIOS configuration mode If you cannot find a corresponding service entry in the BIOS of your computer this means that its processor does not provide a CPU ID Note that currently only Pentium III pro cessors provide this ID the output above e g stems from an AMD Athlon processor e lmhostid flexid does not return the dongle ID If 1mhostid does not return the ID that is printed on the back of the dongle check whether the dongle driver is installed and configured correctly as described in section 2 3 5 If the driver is installed but 1mhostid still does not return the correct ID please check the corresponding port parallel or USB of your computer before requesting a new dongle 6 5 4 Troubleshooting in HDevelop This section explains some typical errors while starting HDevelop and their reasons e No license found This error message might have several reasons The file HALCONROOT license license dat is missing and or not readable HALCON 6 1 4 78 CH
123. s can share the underlying gray values HALCON 6 1 4 64 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Chapter 5 Using Parallel HALCON This chapter explains how to use Parallel HALCON concentrating on the main features of Parallel HALCON automatic parallelization and the support of parallel programming Like standard HALCON Parallel HALCON can be used in two ways You can integrate the corresponding libraries in your own C C or COM programs or you can use the parallelized variant of HDevelop Parallel HDevelop Parallel HALCON and HDevelop Like the HALCON library HDevelop exists in two variants The standard HDevelop builds upon the standard HALCON library as before the corresponding executable is called hdevelop or hdevelop exe The second variant builds upon Parallel HALCON and therefore automat ically parallelizes operators if used on a multi processor hardware The corresponding exe cutable is called parhdevelop or parhdevelop exe under Windows NT 2000 XP you can start it via the menu Start gt Programs gt MVTec HALCON gt Parallel HDevelop Note that Parallel HDevelop differs from standard HDevelop only insofar that it uses the auto matic parallelization mechanism You cannot write parallel programs inside Parallel HDevelop Parallel HALCON in a Stand Alone Application To create an application using Parallel HALCON you must link the corresponding libraries to your programs U
124. s does not uninstall the driver as they might also be used by another application The uninstallation removes the auxiliary program though There fore if you want to uninstall the drivers do so before uninstalling HALCON of course the program can still be found on the HALCON CD in the directory FLEX1m i586 nt4 flexid9 HALCON 6 1 4 28 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 4 Configuration Most of the configuration necessary to work with HALCON amounts to setting environment variables e g to tell HALCON the directories where to find images or extension packages etc These environment variables are described below To work with Parallel HALCON you need to initialize it once on each computer it is to be used on This is described in section 5 1 1 2 4 1 Configuring HALCON Under Windows NT 2000 XP The installation program Setup exe automatically sets the necessary environment variables e g AHALCONROOT XHALCONIMAGES4 and ZHALCONEXTENSIONS see below To take a look at these setting open the dialog Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt System and select Environment You can add or modify a variable by entering the name of a variable and the desired value If a value consists of multiple items as e g the variable PATH4 which may contain multiple directories those items must be separated by semicolons Please note that in order to modify variables set during the HALCON installation you need administrator privilege
125. scribed briefly Please note that depending on your installation not all directories will be present Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Zils INSTALLATION 13 FLEX1m This directory contains programs used for licensing see section 2 3 in subdi rectories corresponding to the different platforms bin This directory contains HALCON programs for example HDevelop Windows hdevelop exe UNIX hdevelop again in subdirectories corresponding to the different platforms For Windows this directory also contains the DLL version of the HALCON libraries and the libraries for the supported frame grabbers interfaces calib This directory contains description files for the calibration plates which you can use to calibrate your camera doc pdf Here you find the PDF version of the user s manuals subdirectory manuals and of the reference manuals subdirectory reference examples The subdirectories of this directory contain example programs for the different parts of the HALCON system gt application_guide Examples referenced in the Application Guide gt c Examples for using HALCON within the programming language C see also the HALCON C User s Manual gt cpp Examples for using HALCON within the programming language C see also the HALCON C User s Manual gt c Examples for using HALCON within the programming language C see also the HALCON COM User s Manual gt delphi Examples for using HALCON with
126. sis programs In most cases developing image analysis programs is a complex and time consuming task To help the user to find the right operators and parameters for a given task HAL CON provides the Computer Aided Vision Engineering tool HDevelop This eases de veloping programs in several ways First HDevelop has a graphical user interface that allows an easy intuitive handling of operators and image data Secondly operators can be processed and combined interactively All results are immediately visualized so that the user can experiment with different operators and parameter values and directly sees the result Moreover HDevelop supports the user by suggesting appropriate operators and parameter values An online help explains how the operators work and illustrates their usage by examples If you are satisfied with the result you can save the developed program either in a special HDevelop file format to load it again into HDevelop later on or export the program as C C or COM source code By exporting the program can be used by other image analysis applications and can be edited and optimized just like any hand written image processing program DO HALCON already provides interfaces to more than 50 frame grabbers HALCON supports more than 50 frame grabbers the current list can be found at http www mvtec com halcon by providing interfaces to their SDKs To estab lish a connection to one of these frame grabbers all you need
127. slower than expected within Visual Studio Please note that the developing environment Microsoft Visual Studio massively influences the scheduling on a multi processor computer As a consequence programs using Parallel HALCON run slower than expected when started within Visual Studio This concerns both the automatic parallelization mechanism and multithreaded programs in general To get the full performance create a corresponding executable exe file and start it outside Visual Studio e An operator returns different results in HALCON and Parallel HALCON respec tively This problem can occur if you called the operator with input parameters containing tu ples Note that certain input parameters of HALCON operators must not receive tuple values however some operators will work without returning an error in such a case You can check whether a parameter may receive tuples in the operator s description on line help or reference manual Parameters that can receive tuples are marked with the suffix array after their type e g region array 6 5 6 Miscellaneous Problems e No refresh of window content on a UNIX system On some UNIX systems the default behavior regarding occluded windows may be set in an inconvenient way for HALCON The result is that if a window is temporarily occluded by another window its content is not saved and restored anymore 1 e windows remain black after uncovering An example is the Linux di
128. stribution SuSE 7 0 The correspond ing property is called backing store you can check the current setting of this property by typing the following example corresponds to a SuSE 7 0 Linux system xdpyinfo grep backing store which should result in the output like options backing store YES save unders YES if the window content is saved and restored You can change this behavior by modifying the file Xservers residing in the directory usr 1ib X11 xdm or similar see your sys HALCON 6 1 4 80 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS tem s documentation Note that you probably need root privileges to modify this file Append the option bs 1 e plus backing store to the line that starts the local X server 0 local usr X11R6 bin X 0 vt07 bs Now stop and start the X server again by using the appropriate commands or by rebooting your computer the command xdpyinfo now should yield the output shown above Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 Index NET 3 ball bondings 35 ActivVisionTools 15 adapt_template 68 add_channels 52 ARCHITECTURE 28 30 area_center 50 57 assertions 56 assign 49 51 54 asynchronous grabbing 61 best_match 2 52 54 best_match_mg 52 break point HDevelop 38 43 C 1 3 56 export of HDevelop programs 3 C 1 3 56 export of HDevelop programs 3 C 56 channel 57 63 check_par_hw_potential 17 31 66 chord 57 clear_template 52 close_all_framegrabbers
129. taining the pixel positions of all centers Now that we know how tuples are processed we can have a closer look at the different object classes of iconic data images regions and XLD objects 4 2 2 Image Objects Image objects contain the pixel data for image processing They may be tuple objects containing more than one image object or a single image object Every single image object consists of one domain describing its area of definition and one or more channels containing the gray values of the pixels cf figure 4 2 The number of channels is not restricted A monochrome image may only have one channel a color image may contain three channels according e g to the RGB scheme a multisensor image may have several channels The domain of an image object may be of any size and is represented by a region Thus it can have holes or may consist of several unconnected areas see figure 4 3 The default domain of an image object is the smallest rectangle enclosing the image It may be changed to any size e g via the operator reduce_domain so that every image has its individual domain Introducing an area of definition for an image has the following advantage All image operators work only within this image domain This allows to focus the processing on a region of interest The amount of data to work on becomes smaller so that the processing is sped up An example that explicitly makes use of this can be found as HDevelop program named aut
130. th your HALCON license even though your license file exists and is located in the correct directory a first step 1s always to check if the information identifying your computer or dongle see section 2 3 1 matches the corresponding entries in the license file see section 2 3 3 If the two do not match please send the new identifying information to your distributor See below if you encounter problems with extracting the identifying informa tion If you are using floating licenses please have a look at section 2 3 4 especially regarding the choice of a suitable port number for the license manager daemon If you are using a dongle bound license with HALCON 6 0 2 or higher and get the message license not found or a similar error message you might need to uninstall the old dongle driver and install the new one manually as described in section 2 3 5 1 6 5 3 1 Problems When Extracting Identifying Information e About HDevelop does not show any host IDs If HDevelop fails to detect any host IDs although your computer does have a network board a Pentium III or a dongle please try to extract the host IDs manually as described in section 2 3 1 2 e Licensing via network card does not work when network is not connected On Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems you must disable Media Sense DHCP when no network is connected to the network card Usually it is suffi cient to disable the DHCP protocol in this case Further details can b
131. tion AMD and AMD Athlon are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices Inc All other nationally and internationally recognized trademarks and tradenames are hereby rec ognized More information about HALCON can be found at http www mvtec com halcon About This Manual This manual is a quick guide to HALCON the software solution for machine vision applica tions HALCON is a sophisticated image analysis package suitable for product development research and education It provides operators covering a wide range of applications Fac tory automation quality control remote sensing and aerial image interpretation medical image analysis and surveillance tasks For rapid prototyping HALCON includes HDevelop a highly interactive programming environment which allows to design and test image analysis programs and to generate C C or COM code The manual provides all necessary information to install and configure HALCON to understand its basic philosophy and to get acquainted with HDevelop The manual is intended for all new users of HALCON It does not assume that you are an expert in image processing Regardless of your skills it 1s quite easy to work with HALCON using HDevelop Anybody should be able to understand the basic HALCON principles to solve his image analysis problems quickly Nevertheless it is helpful to have an idea about the functionality of graphical user interfaces GUI and about s
132. to copy such files to another directory before starting the uninstallation The uninstallation warns if it encounters DLLs or executables that might be or are actually used by another application The warnings regarding halconx dll and HFGDirectShow d11 can safely be ignored 1 e the files can be removed In contrast warnings regarding mvtecd exe and lmgrd exe are serious they indicate that the license manager daemon was installed manu ally but not uninstalled In this case we recommend to abort the uninstallation process uninstall the license manager daemon manually as described in section 2 3 4 1 and then restart the unin stallation of HALCON The uninstallation process will not remove any user specific settings This means that registry entries concerning e g the layout of HDevelop or its file history will be left in the category HKEY_CURRENT_USER gt Software gt MVTec gt HALCON You may remove these entries manually without risk Furthermore it does not remove the dongle drivers as they might be needed by another application section 2 3 5 describes how to remove them manually Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 2 UNINSTALLATION 17 Special Information for HALCON 6 0 2 From version 6 0 2 on HALCON requires a newer version of the dongle driver programs from GLOBE trotter see also section 2 3 5 However the uninstallation process does not uninstall the old dongle driver as a consequence during the installation o
133. tor By the way Program lines that are not needed any more can be permanently removed Just select them left mouse button and choose Edit gt Delete Don t be shy there is an Edit gt Undo as well To temporarily deactivate a line use Edit gt Deactivate and Edit gt Activate to activate the line again HALCON 6 1 4 54 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP 3 12 Using Control Constructs HDevelop offers various control statements to construct more complicated programs For a de tailed specification see the HDevelop Users Manual You already have encountered the assign statement in the previous sections We will now use two other control statements for and if to further improve the example program Up to now all matching positions returned by best_match in section 3 11 were used to display a rectangle This might lead to undesirable results if the matching fails for some of the input objects Just decrease MaxError to 5 for example to see what happens For each input object in BallImage which does not contain the template 0 is returned in Row and Column and the maximum average gray value deviation of 255 1s returned in Error The correct way to handle these matching errors is to check for all resulting matching positions whether they are valid or not Simultanously the real number of detected balls can be computed Initialize a counter with the assign statement RealNumBalls 0 Then program a loop with the counter i
134. vices gt Services If the daemon was installed successfully the dialog contains the entry HALCON Licenses Installing the License Manager Daemon Manually If you did not install the license manager daemon via the setup or if its installation failed you can install it manually at a later time as described below Note that you need administrator privileges for this procedure Open a Windows Command Prompt change into the directory HALCONROOT FLEX1m i586 nt4 and type one long command line installs n HALCON Licenses c AHALCONROOT license license dat 1 XHALCONROOT license license log e XHALCONROOTY FLEXlm i586 nt4 lmgrd exe Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 2 3 LICENSING 29 with XHALCONROOT 4 being the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the installation For example if you have installed HALCON in the directory C Program Files MVTec HALCON you type installs n HALCON Licenses c C Program Files MVTec HALCON license license dat 1 C Program Files MVTec HALCON license license log e C Program Files MVTec HALCON FLEXlm i586 nt4 lmgrd exe The quotes are necessary to handle paths that contain blanks like the one above properly To check whether the installation succeeded re open the Windows dialog showing the state of the installed services see above which now should contain the entry HALCON Licenses or to be more exact an entry with the name you specified with the option n or
135. window will be opened containing all the elements of the tuple ai uu PP es a a ai pr Figure 3 10 The final result of the ball detection based on morphology The further processing of control data is facilitated by a built in formula interpreter See the HDevelop User s Manual for details For example you could compute the average value of the tuple Radius with the following HDevelop assign statement see Operator gt Control assign meanRadius sum Radius Radius which is displayed in the program window as meanRadius sum Radius Radius A more reasonable measurement concerning the quality control task might be the computation of the minimum area of the balls This can be achieved by applying the HALCON operator HALCON 6 1 4 50 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP area_center in Operators gt Regions gt Features which calculates the area of each ball followed by another assign statement area_center FinalBalls Area RowCenter ColCenter minArea min Area Of course tuples of control values can also be used as input parameters For example draw the circles you have computed with the HALCON operator disp_circle in Operators gt Graphics gt Output see figure 3 10 disp_circle WindowID Row Column Radius 3 11 Finding Bonding Balls Using Pattern Matching The morphologic approach detected the desired bonding balls by suppressing spurious parts of the raw segmentation gained by th
136. y with the parameters mode on within a HALCON program The main difference between the two modes for activating HALCON Spy is that by defining HALCONSPY it is possible to monitor an already linked HALCON program during runtime without modifications For further information on how to use HALCON Spy and how to parameterize it via this environment variable please refer to section 6 4 e DISPLAY The system uses this environment variable to open windows It is used in the same way as for other X applications e HOME This system variable points to your home directory In Parallel HALCON 6 0 beta the operator check_par_hw_potential which initializes Parallel HALCON see section 5 1 1 saved the extracted information about the host computer in the file HOME halcon_par_info 2 5 Integrating a HALCON Extension Package The HALCON Extension Package Interface allows to integrate newly developed image process ing algorithms into HALCON in the form of so called extension packages The same mecha nism is used by MVTec to extend the current HALCON release with additional functionality Which extensions packages are currently available can be checked by selecting HDevelop s menu entry Help gt HALCON News WWW which connects to MVTec s WWW server This section describes how to integrate a downloaded package in order to use it within your HALCON system 2 5 1 Installing an Extension Package First move the package to the directory ZHAL
137. ysis modules structured in the same way as the Operators menu Simply select an appropriate chapter and continue browsing until you find your operator There are also many cross references according to the relationships between the operators At the end of the main page there is an index of all operators which helps you to jump directly to a specific operator HTML page Furthermore the menu Suggestions gt Keywords offers access to HALCON operators by keywords By selecting this menu item a window is displayed with the available keywords on the left side and the operators related to the selected keywords on the right side If you select a keyword using your mouse you will see the corresponding operators in the right area Each mouse click in the left area marks the keyword and adds some operators in the right area To finally select an operator and display it in the operator window just click on the operator name using your left mouse button Once you have selected one of the operators like read_image in our example you can enquire information related to this operator from the operator knowledge base e The HTML online help Just click on the Help button to launch your default web browser and get the complete online documentation of the selected operator Getting Started with HALCON 2005 02 01 3 7 FINDING THE RIGHT PARAMETER VALUES 45 e Suggestions gt Alternatives If an intermediate result does not fulfill your requirements you mi
138. ze of the most recently displayed image However in this exam ple we are going to open a new window with the proper size because we will need its window handle later on Again there is a interactive way to do this see menu Visualization but we will use the HDevelop operator dev_open_window instead to include this task in the program itself HDevelop operators are handled in the same way as HALCON operators You can access them via the menu Operators gt HDevelop or directly via the operator window s text field The parameter Width and Height specify the size of the window If you do not know the size of the current image you just specify 1 for both parameters In that case the size of the most recently created image will be used dev_open_window 0 0 1 1 black WindowID Click on Ok and a new graphics window appears It has the same size as your image But the new graphics display remains dark It 1s now the active graphics window and waits for your input It is up to you what to display in this window Double click on the iconic variable Die in the variable window by using the left mouse button in order to display this image Now you see the input image without distortion see figure 3 1 The default visualization for an image 1s to display the image matrix 1 e the gray or color value of each pixel You can easily switch to other visualization modes via Visualization gt Set parameters gt paint Choose for example

Download Pdf Manuals

Related Search

Related Contents

Manual de utilização  取扱説明書  

Copyright © All rights reserved. Failed to retrieve file