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Getting Started with HALCON

1. MVTec ID 0080c77161e2 HRARRRRRRARRRRRRARARRRRRA RA RARA SERVER halconserver 0080c7 161e2 744 DAEMON mvtecd C Progra 1 MVTec Halcon FLEX1m i586 nt4 mvtecd FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 2 4C72DB2ECOF315624FAE VENDOR_STRING 16383 ck 97 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 2 OC52EBFE396EC7015CD5 VENDOR_STRING 16383 ck 43 Figure 2 6 Floating development license bound to computer information about the environment variable ARCHITECTURE However since you cannot use environment variables in the license file you must supply this path manually Paths includ ing blanks are not handled properly under Windows NT Thus if you have 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 Finally you have to make sure that the license manager daemon 1mgrd is started at boot time Installing the License Manager Under Windows NT or Windows 2000 On Windows NT or Windows 2000 systems the setup program installs the license manager as the system service Halcon Licenses which will be started automatically at boot time How ever if you first installed HALCON specifying the nodelocked licensing scheme and then de cided to use a floating license you must install the license daemon lmgrd manually To install it open a DOS command prompt and type one long command line A HALCONROOT AFLEX1m1i586 nt4linstalls n Halcon Lic
2. edges_sub_pix 50 Environment variables HALCONROOT doc html reference hdevelop 18 images 19 71 ocr 19 Environment variables SHLIB_PATH 20 Environment variables 19 ARCHITECTURE 19 20 DISPLAY 21 HALCONEXTENSIONS 19 21 HALCONIMAGES 19 20 HALCONROOT 18 19 doc html reference hdevelop 20 help 18 20 images 20 license 19 20 lut 18 20 ocr 20 HALCONSPY 19 21 HOME 21 LD_LIBRARY_PATH 20 Erosion 49 Example session 25 Extended line description 49 Extension Package Interface 4 FA 3 Factory automation 3 fast_match 2 Frame Grabber Parallel HALCON 59 Frame grabber 3 Asynchronous grabbing 51 External trigger 51 Interface 46 50 Synchronous grabbing 51 Volatile Grabbing 52 Graphics window 26 29 31 35 Gray value 35 47 HALCON Demo version 7 Full development version 7 Runtime version 7 12 Halcon 1 File Structure 9 Installation 7 Library 19 Operator 29 Packages Installation 21 Uninstallation 10 Halcon configuration 18 UNIX 19 Windows NT 18 HALCON extension package 3 46 and Parallel HALCON 60 HALCONEXTENSIONS 19 21 Installation 22 HALCON Spy 19 21 62 and Parallel HALCON 60 HALCONEXTENSIONS 22 HDevelop 3 19 Help 61 Program 29 Troubleshooting 67 Help HDevelop 61 HORUS 4 Host language 46 HP UX 4 24 Iconic data 46 Iconic variable 31 Image 47 Color 2 Matrix 47 Multichannel 2 Object 47 Sequence 8 Image file 30 Ima
3. 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 operator 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 Fig 3 8 Due to noise the resulting region all the dark parts within the board might have Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 3 9 FINDING BONDING BALLS USING MORPHOLOGY 37 Figure 3 8
4. FEATURE in the example files 6 0 However a license is not exclusively bound to this revi sion First a license 1s downward compatible 1 e a license for HALCON 6 0 1s also valid for HALCON 5 2 Secondly a license is upward compatible within a major revision number 1 licenses for HALCON 6 0 are also valid for HALCON 6 0 x 2 4 4 Using Floating Licenses 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 on which the li cense server runs in the example halconserver its identifying information in the example network card ID and the port number in the example 744 You may need to customize the entry for the hostname 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 if you change the name of your host computer or in the case the license is bound to a network card ID if you move the network card to another computer You may also customize the port number Finally depending on where you have installed HALCON you may have to customize the path to the daemon mvtecd which is in charge of managing the HALCON licenses Nor mally the path will be HALCONROOT FLEX1m ZARCHITECTURE mvtecd see section 2 5 for Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 4 LICENSING 17 HRRRRRRARRARERRAARRRRRARARERRR
5. The operator data base is situated in this directory It 1s accessible by all HALCON programs to obtain information about HALCON operators HALCONROOT doc htm1 reference hdevelop HDevelop uses this directory for online help which can be displayed by a suitable HTML browser like Netscape Communicator HALCONROOTY Lut User defined look up tables are situated in this directory Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 9 CONFIGURATION 19 HALCONROOT ocr This directory includes trained fonts HALCONROOT license This directory contains the license keys necessary for using HALCON HALCONROOT images If the variable HALCONIMAGES see below 1s not set the system looks for image files in this directory 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 semicolons ARCHITECTURE HALCON uses this variable to differentiate between the supported platforms op erating systems On a Windows NT or Windows 2000 system ZARCHITECTURE is set to 1586 nt4 The variable appears in different directory paths Executable HALCON programs e g hdevelop exe and DLLs e g halcon dll reside in AHALCONROOT bin i586 nt4 During installation this path is automatically added to the environment variable PATH The libraries which you need for linking programs e g halcon 1ib reside in the directory HALCONROO
6. USING PARALLEL HALCON 3 single write multiple read A certain group of operators should be called simultaneously only 1f 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 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 classificator
7. for additional information Note that an uninstallation will also remove all examples images and the documentation If you modified an example or added an image you might want to copy these files to another directory before starting the uninstallation 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 Uninstalling HALCON 5 0 or 5 1 Please note that the uninstallation of HALCON versions 5 0 and 5 1 will delete the environment variable PATH This is due to an error in the third party installation software that is used If you have installed other software packages that have modified this variable please preserve the old settings prior to the uninstallation In the system control panel System entry Environment rename the variable e g to PATH_ After the uninstallation rename it again back to PATH and remove the HALCON specific directories within this variable manually Uninstalling floating licenses for HALCON 5 0 or 5 1 If you uninstall a HALCON version 5 0 or 5 1 with floating licenses the FLEXIm license man ager service occasionally is not removed properly To make sure that the service is removed please start a DOS command prompt prior to the uninstallation and type HALCONRO
8. 40 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 Fig 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 thresholding 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_rectanglei WindowID Row1 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 2000 11 16 3 11 FINDING BONDING BALLS USING PATTERN MATCHING 41
9. Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 1 1 FACTS ABOUT HALCON 3 The HALCON memory manager uses fast efficient algorithms to speed up image pro cessing It provides mechanisms for controlled memory access and services for debug ging 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 O0 HALCON provides the tool HDevelop for interactive development of image analy 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 use
10. 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 1t provides the means to control the execution of an HDevelop program HALCON 6 0 28 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP Performs this Operation New Deletes the current program in the program window Open 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 Inserts copied lines in the program window Run Executes the HDevelop program Step Executes the next command of the HDevelop program Stop Stops the 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 Pixel info Opens the pixel info window Zooming Opens the online zooming window Gray histogram info Opens the interactive gray histogram inspection window Region info Opens the interactive region feature inspection window 3 1 2 Program Window This window is used to display a HD
11. 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 Fig 3 11 Then copy the program line for reducing the image domain to the resulting region ROT 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 ImageReduced 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 Row1 Row2 2 Temp1Col 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 pb Filter gt Match delivers the region Matches containing all possible matching positions fast_match Die Matches TemplateID 20 Double click on
12. a new package within HDevelop under Windows NT Solaris IRIX or DIG ITAL UNIX Tru64 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 HP UX you have to include the package library subdirectory 1ib hppal 1 hp hpux10 in the environment variable SHLIB_PATH before starting HDevelop the first time Under Linux you have to include the package library subdirectory 1ib i586 linux2 2 in the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting HDevelop the first time 2 6 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 DLEs under Windows shared libraries under UNIX to the application code besides the standard HALCON library of course 2 6 3 1 Using an Extension Package Under Windows NT 2000 In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link packagec 1ib or packagecpp 11ib to your objects Furthermore you will need halconc 1ib or halconcpp 1lib 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 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 6 INTEGRATING A HALCON EXTENSION PACKAGE 23 HALCONROOT Apackageslhal
13. 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 extension_package The example user package halconuser see also the Exten sion Package Programmer s Manual gt fg_integration Example programs for frame grabber interfaces see also the Frame Grabber Integration 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 vb Examples for using HALCON within Microsoft Visual Basic together with the example programs described in 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 is allowed to save a modified example program More importantly on some operating systems not all users have the permission to create new files in the example subdirectories this causes errors in those example pro grams which contain operators that write data to files To experiment with examples we therefore recommend to create a private copy in your own working directory e images This directory contains example images and in subdirectories image sequences These images are used by the example programs described above e i
14. cpu64 lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEX1m host ID of this machine is 0003 C1DE 01C3 E79F 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 Imhost id 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 3 3 for troubleshooting To check the dongle ID Windows NT and Windows 2000 only type lmhostid flexid The output now might look like this gt lmhostid flexid lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEX1m host ID of this machine is FLEXID 7 36c79bd7 Note that this number is also written on the back of the dongle Do not start the program from the Explorer You must use a DOS command prompt Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 4 LICENSING 15 Used Modules af Basic operators ge image region ALDO management a Image fiters SuUb pixel operators Template matching Region processing 444 Morphology Background estimation Optical character recognition Fourier descriptors Wiener filter Camera calibration Tools ge System Barcode reader Optical character verification Close Save Fi
15. 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 In fact the HALCON frame grabber interfaces internally use a so called double buffering strategy to assure that a HALCON application can 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 2000 11 16 4 4 LIMITATIONS 53 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 is 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 g
16. on parallel threads This method requires that all input parameters contain the same number of tuple elements or contain a single object or value Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 5 2 PARALLEL PROGRAMMING 57 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 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
17. 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 or Windows 2000 or in the file halcon_par_info in the directory HALCONROOT under UNIX Please note that on some operating systems you need special privileges to initialize Parallel HALCON suc cessfully otherwise the operator check_par_hw_potential is not able to store the extracted information Under 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_info Please note that the operator check_par_hw_ potential returns without an error 1f 1t 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 1 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 input parameters containing tuples it can be parallelized by distributing the tuple elements
18. the full image processing 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 2 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 more than 30 frame grabbers language interfaces to C C and COM and the Extension Package Interface which allows you to integrate your own HALCON operators or addi tional frame grabber interfaces 3 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 key The demo version can be used without a license Independent of the version you use there are two possible licensing schemes 1 Nodelocked licenses are only valid on one specific host or for a specific hardware don gle 2 Floating licenses are valid on arbitrary hosts within a local network A license server checks the number of currently active HALCON applications A new application can be started only if the overall number of licenses 1s not exceeded Please note that for evaluating purposes you can obtain a
19. 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 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 0 60 CHAPTER 5 USING PARALLEL HALCON close_all_framegrabbers are processed completely exclusively Furthermore these opera tors are local 1 e under Windows NT 2000 they should be called from the main thread see section 5 2 1 Under Windows NT and Windows 2000 each frame grabber interface comes as two DLLs one for standard 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 Un
20. which the circular mask for the opening has fitted as well In order to eliminate this error the intermediate result the region BallRegion is 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 is a 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 contain 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 circu
21. 16 3 12 USING CONTROL CONSTRUCTS 43 read_image Die die3 draw_rectanglei WindowID Row1 Columni Row2 Column2 gen_rectanglel ROI Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 reduce_domain Die ROI ImageReduced create_template ImageReduced 5 4 sort original TemplatelID 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 operator 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 3 12 Using Control Constructs HDevelop offers various control statements to construct more complicated programs For a detailed 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 rectang
22. ALCON FRAME GRABBER INTERFACE 91 the Reference Manual for detailed information 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 interfaces 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 407s 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 Th
23. HALCON Version 6 0 MT MVTec Software GmbH Getting Started with HALCON User s Manual Getting Started with HALCON Version 6 0 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 July 1997 Edition November 19977 Edition March 1998 Edition April 1999 Edition October 2000 ae oae a EC Copyright 1997 2000 by MVTec Software GmbH M nchen Germany vrec sonware cmon Microsoft Windows Windows NT and Windows 2000 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 HP HP UX and PA RISC are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Hewlett Packard Company 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 Compaq Computer Corporation Intel and Pentium are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation 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 Mor
24. LCON program by inserting the line in HDevelop notation set_spy mode on Alternatively you can activate HALCON Spy for an already linked program by defining the environment variable HALCONSPY 1 e by setting it to any value How to set environment variables is described in section 2 5 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 HALCONSPY Under Windows NT set HALCONSPYY 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 6 3 Troubleshooting This section offers help for problems encountered during installing or uninstalling HALCON when using HDevelop or when using Parallel HALCON 6 3 1 Problems During Installation e Registration of halconx dl11 failed On some systems you might get a warning message that the HALCON COM interface library halconx dl11 failed to self register A possible cause for this may b
25. ON 5 1 March 1998 The chapter About This Manual has been introduced A complete revision of the manual has been done e g concerning the installation or the licensing section in chapter Getting Started The example session has not changed much The major difference in handling HDevelop in this basic example is that when changing the visualization parameters the iconic object has to be displayed before the parameters are changed because the last iconic object is automatically re displayed e 2 Edition November 1997 The visualization capabilities of HDevelop have been greatly enhanced Zooming into an image can now be handled very conveniently for example Contents 1 Introducing HALCON 1 Lol Facts aboUt HALCON aceata a Bee e a da ae l EZ System Reguirements 4 od a o da dos db a g dias a A 5 1 3 Introducing Parallel HALCON o 5 1 4 Additional Sources of Information o sooo 6 2 Installation Licensing Configuration 7 ZA Jostallanon eaa e de a Bb de Be e e ea Bh eh we a E 7 21L Widows NTA 20005 20 das dia da o a Bad bee da 8 DN UNIX at AA AAA a he 9 2 2 The Installed HALCON File Structure 0 9 Zo Unimstallation s oe ns is A A A eB is 10 23 1 Windows NT 2000 sece oge renieu a a a oe 10 Doe WIND 2 oes bo eS A REE Re RE a 12 2A FCn me e ew kw he me wh Wh Eee ee he Whe He Bh A 12 2 4 1 Extracting Identifying Information 13 2 4 2 Runtime Li
26. ONROOT AFLEX1m1i586 nt4linstalls r n Halcon Licenses 2 Start regedit and delete the keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt Microsoft gt Windows gt CurrentVersion gt Uninstall gt Halcon and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt MVTec 3 Using e g the NT Explorer delete the directory hsystemRoot AProfilesiA11 Users Start Menu Programs Halcon Note that SystemRoot usually is C WINNT 4 Finally delete the HALCON base directory HALCONROOT gt The option c is only included if you have chosen an installation with floating licenses HALCON 6 0 66 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS 6 3 3 Problems Concerning Licenses If you encounter problems with your HALCON license even though your license file exists and is located in the correct directory a first step is always to check if the information identifying your computer or dongle see section 2 4 1 matches the corresponding entries in the license file see section 2 4 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 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 4 1 2 e Imhostid ether returns ffffffff If Imhostid returns ffffffff this usua
27. OT AFLEXImii586 nt4linstalls r n Halcon Licenses Uninstalling the HALCON COM Beta Version If you had installed the so called beta version of the HALCON COM interface you must unin stall manually before uninstalling HALCON itself The reason is that the beta version of the COM interface was an add on to HALCON 5 1 whereas the current version is an integral part of HALCON If you installed the beta version of the COM interface by using its InstallShield wizard it is quite easy to remove it again Select Add Remove Software in Start gt Settings gt Control Panel then select Halcon COM from the software list and finally click on Add Remove HALCON 6 0 12 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION If you installed the beta version of the COM interface by hand you must unregister it by hand as well For this open the dialog Start gt Run and type regsvr32 u and open the browser to locate the place where you copied the corresponding DLL halconx d11 to Select halconx d11 and click Open This will append the complete path behind regsvr32 u Now click OK to unregister the DLL After a while a message box should pop up containing something like this DLLUnRegisterServer in halconx dll succeeded Now you may delete the file halconx d11 itself 2 3 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
28. Online help 34 61 Operating systems 4 Operator Description 46 Operator library Extension 3 Operator knowledge base 1 34 61 Operator library 1 Operator window 26 28 30 Text field 29 31 34 Parallel HALCON 5 Configuration 56 Extension package 60 Frame Grabber 59 HALCON Spy 60 Programming 57 Switch off 59 Troubleshooting 68 Pattern matching 2 PC 29 Performance 35 Platforms 4 13 DIGITAL UNIX 4 HP UX 4 20 IRIX 4 Linux 4 Solaris 4 Tru64 UNIX 4 Windows 2000 4 Windows NT 4 Portable applications 1 Program counter 28 29 Program creation 26 Program window 26 28 30 Quality control 3 Raw segmentation 36 Re using code 4 reduce_domain 47 Region 48 Form 48 Object 48 Size 48 Region of interest 2 31 36 47 Remote sensing 3 Result visualization 61 ROI 2 31 47 Runlength encoding 48 Session management 26 Shape based matching 2 SHLIB_PATH 22 24 Solaris 4 5 23 Subpixel precision 49 Surveillance tasks 3 System suggestions Alternatives 61 Predecessors 61 System requirements 5 System suggestions 61 Keywords 61 References 61 Successors 61 Troubleshooting HDevelop 67 Installation 62 Licensing 66 Miscellaneous 68 Parallel HALCON 68 Uninstallation 63 HALCON 6 0 74 Tru64 UNIX 4 23 Tuple 2 46 Tuple object 2 46 Uninstallation 10 17 63 Troubleshooting 63 UNIX 1 9 12 17 19 User extensions 19 21 Var
29. T 1ib i586 nt4 HALCONEXTENSIONS This is a list of directories in which user defined extension operators so called extension 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 6 for information on how to install an extension package and the Extension Package Programmer s Manual for details on creating your own extension packages 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 HALCONSPYY 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 2 Please take a look at the file release_notes html within the HALCON package for the latest information 2 5 2 Configuring HALCON Under UNIX The HALCON library and the interactive tool HDevelop use some environment variables which are going to be described in the following It is reasonable to include them in a login script or a shell resource script like cshrc e HALCONROOT T
30. 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 E A Mt ae E 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 wires 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 Fig 3 9 HALCON 6 0 38 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
31. ace library halconx d11 manually as described in section 6 3 1 you must unregister it manually before you can uninstall HAL CON To do so open a command prompt change into the directory misc i586 nt4 on the CD execute the supplied program reg halconx as follows gt gt cd misc i586 nt4 gt reg_halconx u e Removal of the license server As mentioned in section 2 3 1 if you uninstall a HALCON 5 0 or 5 1 version with floating licenses the FLEXIm license manager service occasionally is not removed properly To make sure that the service is removed please start a DOS command prompt prior to the uninstallation and type HALCONROOT AFLEXImii586 nt4linstalls r n Halcon Licenses l The following is one long command line HALCON 6 0 64 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS Note that the DOS command prompt cannot handle paths including blanks properly Thus if you have installed HALCON to a directory like C Program Files MVTec Halcon you will have to type either one line C Progra 1 MVTec Halcon FLEX1m i586 nt4 installs r n Halcon Licenses or quote the command as suggested here one line C Program Files MVTec Halcon FLEX1m i586 nt4 installs r n Halcon Licenses Alternatively you can also change the directory via cd AHALCONROOTA FLEXIm i586 nt4 which is possible even without quotes and type installs r n Halcon Licenses afterwards e Internal Error If the uninstall process 1s terminates
32. ayed in the Graphics Window Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 3 2 EDITING A HDEVELOP PROGRAM 29 3 1 5 Graphics Window This window 1s 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 is placed by pressing the lt Shift 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 window s text field Now the new operator 1s displayed in the operator window Provide or adapt the input parame ters and 1f 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 1s not only inserted but also executed immediately Finally if you click on Apply the operator is not inse
33. brary subdirectory 1ib mips sgi irix6 5 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries 2 6 3 5 Using an Extension Package Under DIGITAL UNIX Tru64 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 subdirectory lib alpha dec osf4 0 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries HALCON 6 0 24 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 6 3 6 Using an Extension Package Under HP UX In order to create new application programs written in C or C you have to link libpackage sl and libpackagec sl or libpackagecpp sl 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 hppa1 1 hp hpux10 to the environment variable SHLIB_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 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 w
34. by executing rm rf HALCONROOT 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 5 2 2 4 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 to obtain and install a license will be given The first step is 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 is 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 hav
35. censes and HALCON Modules 15 243 Installing the License File has do SR ee ee a ee ee se 15 2 4 4 Using Floating Licenses ue ot ke ey Oe we pe Sete ne a 16 A Ni RN 18 ZN Windows NT 2000 e eee hk cd oo de Be das bas Bd 18 E OND cae ia sy oe ets At Bde ch A E E 19 2 6 Integrating a HALCON Extension Package 21 2 6 1 Installing an Extension Package 00 22 2 6 2 Using an Extension Package Within HDevelop 22 2 6 3 Using an Extension Package in a Stand Alone Application 22 3 A First Look at HDevelop 25 3 1 The Graphical User Interface of HDevelop 26 LLE Es A 26 31 2 Program WIMdOW s os da ds a a o i 28 2ks Operator WIldOW edi iaa e ic cae a 28 31d Vanable Window s osas ade A a ee dt laa t a A 28 ALS GrapMiCS WiNGOW i a i de A w cda o eee ee ee eS A a DiS 29 3 2 Editing a HDevelop Program 0 2 00002 eee eee 29 29 Loads am AAA 29 3 4 Modifying the Graphics Window 2 0 ee 31 3 5 Creating a Region of Interest ROD 31 3 6 Finding the Right Operator e 34 3 7 Finding the Right Parameter Values 3 8 Finding the BoardasROl 3 9 Finding Bonding Balls Using Morphology 3 10 Working with Control Variables 2 0004 3 11 Finding Bonding Balls Using Pattern Matching 3 12 Using Control Con
36. cessing 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 autobahn dev under the path HALCONROOT examples hdevelop Applications Sequences tuple image object y image object 1 S Image object 2 E domain channel 1 channel 2 090 ee X O EOI ARANA AAA ES MED AA runlength gray value gray value encoding matrix matrix Figure 4 2 Structure of HALCON image objects HALCON 6 0 48 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON regions may contain holes Yo regions may consist of regions may exceed several unconnected areas the image size regions may be compact Figure 4 3 Different forms and sizes of regions 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
37. ch an operator has to fulfill but you cannot re member the operator s name you have the possibility to obtain an operator by specifying one or more keywords 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 an appropriate HTML browser 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 chapter 2 5 2 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 61 62 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS 6 2 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 operator 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 HA
38. ck 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 a ROI which is used in the following processing steps By re stricting the image domain the performance can be increased significantly because all following HALCON 6 0 32 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_rectanglel1 from the menu Operators gt Graphics gt Drawing to draw a rectangle in the graphics window Just execute th
39. conuserlbinli586 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 2 6 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 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries 2 6 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 1ib sparc sun solaris7 to the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH otherwise the loader will fail to access the libraries 2 6 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 li
40. d 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 is 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 O0 HALCON processes color and multichannel images HALCON works on all kinds of image data binary monochrome color or multichan nel images You may use all these kinds of images in the same manner Multichannel images are useful to work on images that were acquired by a multisensor system 1 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 an optimized encoding to reduce memory costs O0 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
41. de 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 0 52 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON Please note the difference between the two ways of synchronizing described here and in the previous section In the synchronous grabbing mode your application software is 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 1f called before the signal comes have to wait Most HALCON frame grabber interfaces allow to specify a timeout for grab bing via the operator set_framegrabber_param please consult the corresponding online documentation in the direc
42. der 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 d11 under Windows NT 2000 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 2 is working sequentially 1t cannot be used to monitor a Parallel HALCON program 2See section 2 2 for the file structure of HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 Chapter 6 Tips and Tricks This chapter contains information that helps you working with HALCON including sections on troubleshooting 6 1 Online Help in HDevelop HDevelop offers you a broad range of support 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 whi
43. ding executable 1s called hdevelop or hdevelop exe The second variant builds upon Parallel HALCON and therefore automat ically parallelizes operators 1f used on a multi processor hardware The corresponding exe cutable is called parhdevelop or parhdevelop exe under Windows NT you can start it via the menu Start gt Programs gt MVTec HALCON bP Parallel HDevelop Note that Parallel HDevelop differs from standard HDevelop only insofar that 1t 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 C or C programs Under Windows NT you need the libraries parhalconc d11 or parhalconcpp dll depending on the used programming language Under UNIX you need the library libhalcon so and depending on the used programming language libparhalconc so or libparhalconcpp so Please consult the HALCON C User s Man ual and the HALCON C User s Manual 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 Note that Parallel HALCON does not provide an interface to COM in contrast to standard HALCON 55 96 CHAPTER 5 USING PARALLEL HALCON use this
44. 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 following section HALCON 6 0 14 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 4 1 2 Extracting Information Using Imhostid 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 or Windows 2000 open a DOS 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 1586 1linux2 2 or sparc sun solaris7 To identify a computer by its network card type Imhostid ether or just lmhostid Following the example of the previous section the output might look like this on a Windows NT system gt Imhostid ether lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEX1m 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 please consult section 6 3 3 for troubleshooting To identify a computer by its Pentium III CPU number Windows NT and Windows 2000 only type Imhostid cpu64 The output now might look like this gt Ilmhostid
45. e sulting region has to be clipped to the image size see Fig 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 Fig 4 4 b This would make the correct extraction of the fin impossible region after dilation within background region original image background coea region after clipping region after erosion within to image size clipped region region after seac without clipping b _ difference between this region and the background region resulting region is too 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 1s a data structure used for de scribing 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 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 HALCON 6 0 50 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON filter response or angle is s
46. e 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 1 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 platforms such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 Linux Solaris HP UX DIGITAL UNIX now called Tru64 UNIX or IRIX See section 1 2 for more information O0 HALCON supports multi threaded applications by being thread safe HALCON is thread safe under Windows NT Windows 2000 Linux and Solaris Note that for an extensive use of parallel programming techniques you should choose Parallel HALCON see section 1 3 O0 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 JPEG PCX XWD BMP binary Other data e g integer result values for image coordinates may be
47. e implemented Most of them are contained in the HALCON Image Processing Library which is decribed in the Reference Manuals This library can be extended dynamically using so called packages The operators of these packages behave like normal HALCON operators but they contain extensions to the standard library either generated by MV Tec 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 her 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 It allows to access HALCON operators within the programming languages C C and COM Windows NT only The interface to C allows the development of object oriented tools HDevelop is implemented on top of the language interface using HALCON C and the GUI toolkit wxWindows developed by the Artificial Intelligence Applicati
48. e 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 is 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 some 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 infor
49. e main developing environment for COM programs does not support multithreading sufficiently 1 4 Additional Sources of Information For further information you may consult the following manuals e HDevelop User s Manual An introduction to the graphical development environment of the HALCON system e HALCON C User s Manual How to use the HALCON library in your C programs e HALCON C User s Manual How to use the HALCON library in your C programs e HALCON COM User s Manual How to use the HALCON library in your COM programs e g in Visual Basic e Extension Package Programmer s Manual How to extend the HALCON system with your own operators e Frame Grabber Integration Programmer s Manual A guide on how to integrate a new frame grabber in the HALCON system e HALCON HDevelop HALCON C HALCON C HALCON COM The reference manuals for all HALCON operators versions for HDevelop C C and COM 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 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 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 in three versions 1 The demo version is basically a version of HDevelop with
50. e 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 Fig 3 5 To gen erate the corresponding ROI as an HALCON object use the operator gen_rectanglel 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_rectanglel WindowID Row1 Columni Row2 Column2 gen_rectanglel ROI Rowi Columni Row2 Column2 By executing this operator you create another type of HALCON object a region see section 4 2 3 Variable Watch fel ES Iconic Variables 3604 97 5 295 5 305 5 665 5 Figure 3 5 The variable window containing iconic and control variables Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 3 5 CREATING A REGION OF INTEREST ROI 33 The default visualization for a region is the shape of the region here the rectangle drawn with the current color into the graphics window You may manipulate this graphics output by choosing items of the menu Visualization or executing the cor responding HDevelop operator dev_ For e
51. e 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 2000 11 16 3 7 FINDING THE RIGHT PARAMETER VALUES 35 e Suggestions gt Alternatives If an intermediate result does not fulfill your requirements you might want to choose an alternative operator which might be more suitable for your task Note that in many situ ations there is 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 1f you currently look at read_image you might be interested i
52. e 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_async 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 1s 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 is called when the image is already grabbed and not too old already 4 3 2 Using External Triggers Independent of the grabbing mo
53. e that the Microsoft library at1 d11 was not registered properly This library resides in the direc tory SystemRoot system32 e g C WINNT system32 To register the library open Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 6 3 TROUBLESHOOTING 63 a DOS command prompt change into the directory misc i586 nt4 on the CD execute the supplied program reg_halconx as follows 2E gt cd misc i586 nt4 gt reg_halconx atl dll gt reg_halconx The first call of reg_halconx registers at1 d11 the second one registers halconx dl1 e Installing and uninstalling the license manager Occasionally the FLEXIm license manager service needed for floating licenses is not in stalled properly by the installation wizard To install it manually type in a DOS command prompt HALCONROOTA FLEX1m i586 nt4 installs n Halcon Licenses c HALCONROOT Alicensellicense dat 1 HALCONROOT Alicensellicense log e HALCONROOT AFLEX1m1i586 nt4llmgrd exe where HALCONROOT is the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the in stallation You can check the success of this command using the system control panel Services If a new service called Halcon Licenses appears in the list you re done With the same technique you can remove the license manager again HALCONROOT AFLEXImii586 nt4linstalls r n Halcon Licenses 6 3 2 Problems During Uninstallation e Unregistration of halconx dll If you had to register the HALCON COM interf
54. e to extract identifying information about this computer see section 2 4 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 4 2 for more information You will then receive a license file Section 2 4 3 describes how to install this file on your system Section 2 4 4 contains additional information for the case you want to use a floating license 2The full documentation of FLEXIm can be obtained from the FLEXIm end user manual available at http www globetrotter com manual htm Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 4 LICENSING 13 2 4 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 or Windows 2000 and if your computer is equipped with a Pentium III processor it can be identified by the so called CPU ID as well Under Windows NT or Windows 2000 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 is used for identifying the computer which acts as the license
55. e v image object FileName die3 gt 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 gt 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 Fig 3 3 The first parameter is the image object you are about to create Change the default name of the corresponding 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 is displayed in the variable window Simultaneously the result of the operator in this case the original image is display
56. ed 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 4HALCONROOT images which 1s 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 5 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 3 4 MODIFYING THE GRAPHICS WINDOW 31 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 1t 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 size of the most recently displayed image However in this example we are going to open a new window with the proper size because we will need its window han dle 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 o
57. ed 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 Fig 3 7 To choose another parameter value just double click on the program line containing the 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 0 36 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP 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
58. en_image1_extern see the corresponding entry in the Reference Manual for detailed information 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 32768 x 32768 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 objects can share the underlying gray values HALCON 6 0 54 CHAPTER 4 PHILOSOPHY OF HALCON Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 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 or C 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 correspon
59. enses c HALCONROOT Alicensellicense dat 1 HALCONROOT Alicensellicense log e HALCONROOT AFLEX1m1i586 nt4llmgrd exe where HALCONROOT is the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the installation Under Windows 2000 you now must reboot the computer You can check the success of this command using the system control panel Services If a new service called Halcon Licenses appears in the list you re done With the same technique you can remove the license manager again HALCONROOT AFLEXImii586 nt4linstalls r n Halcon Licenses Installing the License Manager Under UNIX On UNIX systems the license server daemon lmgrd must be started from the appropriate startup file called e g sbin init d boot local etc rc boot etc rc local or HALCON 6 0 18 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION etc localrc please consult your system s documentation Add the following line to this file etc lmgrd c HALCONROOT license license dat gt etc license log 2 gt amp 1 amp where HALCONROOT is the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the installation Please note that Imgrd will only work properly when started with root privileges 2 5 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
60. evelop 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 Another 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 1s the control unit for variables generated during the execution of the program Double click on a variable to display 1ts value If the variable corresponds to an image or a set of regions iconic variable the contained objects are displ
61. 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 Under Windows NT operators marked as local should be called only from the main thread and not from an external thread Typical examples are operators that use graph ical I O functions The reason is that under Windows NT there exists a direct mapping between program threads and graphical elements such as windows dialog boxes or but ton controls In short a graphical element only exists in the context of its associated thread This can cause severe problems for example hang the application 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 0 58 CHAPTER 5
62. exchanged via the HALCON language interfaces O How is HALCON related to HORUS HALCON is the commercial successor of the image analysis system HORUS which was developed at the Chair Informatics IX of Prof B Radig at the Technische Univer sit t M nchen from 1988 to 1996 for UNIX systems only Although MVTec took over the basic concepts of the system all the major components have been revised Fur thermore HALCON provides many new features and operators compared to the last HORUS version 4 11 Existing HORUS applications can be adapted to the HALCON system but since the names and interfaces of many operators have been modified some amount of programming is necessary to do that The name was changed mainly due to international trademark considerations Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 1 2 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 5 Windows NT 4 0 Intel Pentium 3 Windows 2000 for compatible MS Visual Studio Intel Pentium mw or compatible 1 2 System Requirements Table 1 2 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 Note that under Linux 1ibc6 glibc 2 1 x is required which is the case for most current Linux distributions like RedHat or SuSE Please check your distribution s documen
63. f 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 is 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 Fig 3 1 The default visualization for an image is 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 3D plot and select Update to see a 3D plot of the image The various visualization modes are desrcipted 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 Cli
64. g 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 2 2 The Installed HALCON File Structure Let s take a look at the installed HALCON file structure in the directory HALCONROOT In the following the most important directories and files are described briefly Please note that depending on your installation not all directories will be present e FLEX1m This directory contains programs used for licensing see section 2 4 in subdi rectories corresponding to the different platforms e bin This directory contains HALCON programs for example HDevelop Windows NT 2000 hdevelop exe UNIX hdevelop again in subdirectories corresponding to the different platforms For Windows NT or Windows 2000 this directory also contains the DLL version of the HALCON libraries and the libraries for the supported frame grabbers interfaces HALCON 6 0 10 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION e doc pdf Here you find the PDF version of the user s manuals subdirectory manuals and of the reference manuals subdirectory reference e examples The subdirectories of this directory contain example programs for the different parts of the HALCON system gt c Examples for using HALCON within the programming language C see
65. ge Compact Custom Typical e the runtime version only Runtime or e just the demo version hdevelop_demo exe Demo If you selected a full version or the runtime version you will be asked to choose between an installation for nodelocked or floating licenses Furthermore the wizard asks whether to install the dongle driver program which is necessary if you want to use a dongle license Prior to installing a new HALCON version you should uninstall any existing old version This is especially of importance to clean up the registry See section 2 3 1 about how to uninstall HALCON Note that the installation wizard checks whether your system meets the requirements for run ning HALCON 6 0 see section 1 2 After the first installation you can install additional parts of HALCON at any time by inserting the CD again specifying Custom and only selecting the parts you need Please note that if you choose Typical most of the image sequences are not installed This means that example 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 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 2 THE INSTALLED HALCON FILE STRUCTURE 9 2 1 2 Installing HALCON Under UNIX To install HALCON on UNIX systems mount the CD e g on the directory cdrom On
66. ge 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 containing 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 Fig 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 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 Fig 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 1ts 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 pro
67. ge file formats 4 Binary 4 BMP 4 Gif 4 JPEG 4 PCX 4 PNM 4 Sun Raster 4 Tiff 4 XWD 4 Image object 30 Insertion cursor 28 29 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 Index Installation 7 Troubleshooting 62 IRIX 4 23 Keywords 34 Language interface 4 46 Language independent operator interface 46 LD_LIBRARY_PATH 22 23 License Development 7 Floating 7 8 16 63 Key 12 15 Nodelocked 7 8 Runtime 7 Temporary 7 Licensing Troubleshooting 66 Limitations 53 Maximum image size 53 Maximum length of strings 53 Maximum number of channels per im age 53 Maximum number of contour points 53 Maximum number of image matrices in memory 53 Maximum number of objects per pa rameter 53 Maximum number of polygon control points 53 Maximum value for coordinates 53 lines_gauss 50 Linux 4 5 23 Loading an image 29 Main window 26 Menu 27 Edit 27 Execute 27 File 27 Help 27 Operators 27 Suggestions 27 Visualization 27 Window 27 Tool bar 27 Activate 28 Copy 28 Cut 28 Index Deactivate 28 Gray histogram info 28 New 28 Open 28 Paste 28 Pixel info 28 Region info 28 Reset 28 Run 28 Save 28 Set parameters 28 Step 28 Stop 28 Zooming 28 Matching pattern matching 2 shape based matching 2 median_image 47 Medical image analysis 3 Memory management 3 Multichannel images 2 Object Image 47 Region 48 Tuple 2 46 XLD 49
68. grams 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 3 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 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 6 3 TROUBLESHOOTING 69 black after uncovering An example is the Linux distribution SuSE 7 0 The correspond ing property is called backing store you can check the current setting of this pro
69. gure 2 2 Used modules in the example program in chapter 3 2 4 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 open a pop up dialog as depicted in figure 2 2 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 2 4 3 Installing the License File Your local distributor will supply you with a license file which you will have to install on your system Normally this file must be put into the directory HALCONROOT license and be called license dat HALCONROOT is the HALCON base directory you have chosen during the installation See the FLEXIm end user manual on how to configu
70. h the server For this you may need to contact your system admin istrator e 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 e Wrong architecture This error indicates that you are using an architecture which 1s not compatible with your HALCON version Check the variable ARCHITECTURE or try to install the proper HAL CON version e hdevelop Command not found Check your system environment variable PATH It has to include the path HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE e lib can t open file If you work with HP UX you have to check whether the system variable SHLIB_PATH is set correctly For all other UNIX architectures you have to check the system variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH see 2 5 2 e No help files for package lt package name gt in directory lt directory gt Possible reasons for this error message are e No files HALCONROOT help if the package name is system or no help files in one of the user packages e Ifthe package name is system Wrong HALCONROOT e Check the file protection Probably HDevelop cannot access important files e Help file for package lt package name gt is corrupt Possible reasons for this error message are e Ifthe package name is system Inconsistent version of HALCONROOT help or wrong HALCONROOT HALCON 6 0 68 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS e If the package name is tha
71. his 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 0 20 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION According to this variable the system switches to subdirectories which are important for running HALCON Some of them are HALCONROOT help The operator data base is situated in this directory It 1s 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 1lut User defined look up tables are situated in this directory HALCONROOT ocr This directory includes trained fonts HALCONROOT license This directory contains the license keys 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 E
72. iable window 26 28 30 31 Visual Basic 1 Visualization Images 31 Regions 33 35 Windows 2000 1 4 5 8 10 14 17 Windows NT 1 4 5 8 10 14 17 18 22 XLD 49 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 Index Index 75 HALCON 6 0
73. is open the dialog Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Devices If there is no entry called Sentinel you must in stall the dongle driver manually Please note that you need administrator priv ileges to install the driver Open a DOS shell and change into the directory HALCONROOTY FLEX1m dongle i586 nt4 Here start the program Setupx86 exe In the appearing window select the menu item Functions gt Install which starts the in stallation process Afterwards reboot your computer Then the driver should appear in the dialog described above Note that if you try to install the driver without administrator privileges the setup program might falsely state that the installation was successful Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 6 3 TROUBLESHOOTING 67 If the driver is installed but 1mhost id still does not return the correct ID please check the parallel port of your computer before requesting a new dongle 6 3 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 licensellicense dat is missing and or not readable Your license is not valid on this machine In case of floating licenses There are too many licenses active e Lost connection to license server Verify if the license server is running You may also check whether your machine is properly connected wit
74. it 1s processed only within the domain of the input image This concept allows to focus image processing and therefore to speed it up O0 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 O0 HALCON provides shape based matching operators that work even in the presence of occlusion or clutter From revision 6 0 on HALCON provides not only pattern matching but also shape based matching operators With these operators you can recognize objects even if they are partly occluded or in the presence of clutter or changing illumination conditions O0 HALCON provides an easy handling of tuple objects and processes tuple elements simultaneously Tuples are very helpful 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 and works simultaneously on the tuple elements O0 HALCON is based on an efficient management of image and data objects
75. ith HDevelop s graphical user interface GUI and learn to use it efficiently The example is chosen from the domain of quality control The goal 1s to detect all ball bondings on a die see Fig 3 1 The HDevelop program corresponding to the example session 1s included in the HALCON package subdirectory HALCONROOT 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 how to handle the graphics window e how to generate a region of interest ROD how to solve the example problem using morphology e how to solve the example problem by pattern matching and 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 image analysis programs in the future 25 26 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 GUI of HDevelop You start HDevelop under Windows NT or Windows 2000 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 do
76. language interface to COM inside Microsoft Visual Basic you need Visual Basic 6 0 Note that some operators can only be called exclusively because of functional or technical reasons See section 5 2 1 for more information HALCON 6 0 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 memoruy 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 A further limitation is that Parallel HALCON does not provide a COM interface 1 e neither the automatic parallelization mechanism nor reentrancy can be used in COM programs The reason is that Microsoft Visual Basic th
77. lar 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 10 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 2000 11 16 3 10 WORKING WITH CONTROL VARIABLES 39 via count_obj in Operators gt Object gt Information count_obj FinalBalls NumBalls Similiar to the draw_rectangle1 command in section 3 3 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 gt Features Among them one you might try now is smallest_circle This operator determines
78. le 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 is 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 O Then program a loop with the counter i and the end value NumBalls control statement for Inside the loop check the error value of each match and skip faulty matches 5A template position which is actually outside of the current image because Row and Column specify the position of the center of the template HALCON 6 0 44 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP for 1 1 to NumBalls by 1 if Errorli 1 lt 255 disp_rectanglei Rowi Row li 1 TemplRow Columni Column i 1 TemplCol Row2 RowLli 1 TemplRow Column2 Column i 1 Temp1Col RealNumBalls RealNumBalls 1 endif endfor Display the original image Die again and execute the above loop to see the result Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 Chapter 4 Philosophy of HALCON This chapter explains the basic concepts of the HALCON system its modular architecture and its data structure
79. lly indicates that you do not have a network board If you do have one on Windows NT systems this might mean that you do not have the NetBEUI and TCP IP protocols installed for the network board This can be checked in the dialog Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt Network gt Protocol If the protocols do not appear in the dialog please install these two protocols by adding them in the dialog Then repeat the steps described in section 2 4 1 1 or 2 4 1 2 e lmhostid cpu64 returns If lmhostid returns an output like gt Imhostid cpu64 lmhostid Copyright C 1989 2000 Globetrotter Software Inc The FLEX1m host ID of this machine is Imhostid FLEX1m 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 4 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 lImhostid flexid does not return the dongle ID If lmhostid does not return the ID that is printed on the back of the dongle check whether the dongle driver is installed For th
80. m 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_rectangle or draw_region depending on which method you have activated and press Run In order to stop the execution 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 0 34 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 more than 900 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 is up to your experience and image analysis knowledge to make the right selection However HDevelop support
81. 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 Fig 3 12 disp_rectanglei WindowID Row1 Row TemplRow Columni Column Temp1Col Row2 Row TemplRow Column2 Column Temp1Col You should make sure that the region visualization is set to margin using Visualization gt draw before executing this command Atk a AA n E Si er Figure 3 12 The final result of the ball detection based on pattern matching If you do not need the template any longer 1t 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 Again 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 1t is not too interesting to use best_match_mg in this case Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11
82. mation 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 e 5 Edition 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 e 4 Edition HALCON 5 2 April 1999 The new Apply button is used in the example session The extended menu and tool bars of HDevelop are described in the introduction The installation process is described in more detail for UNIX systems e 3 Edition HALC
83. 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 HALCON 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 A bin ARCHITECTUREfS 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
84. 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 the environment variable HALCONROOT has to be set to this directory later see section 2 5 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 Prior to installing a new HALCON version you should uninstall any old HALCON ver sion See section 2 3 2 for details Note that the installation script checks whether your system meets the requirements for running HALCON 6 0 see section 1 2 After the installation several environment variables need to be set in order for HALCON to work See section 2 5 2 for details Note that you can install additional parts of HALCON at any time by mountin
85. n the form of so called extension packages The same mecha nism is used by MV Tec to extend the current HALCON release with additional functionality Which extensions packages are currently available can be checked at http www mvtec com halcon This section describes how to integrate a downloaded package in order to use it within your HALCON system HALCON 6 0 22 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION 2 6 1 Installing an Extension Package First move the package to the directory HALCONROOT and unpack it there Then add the complete path of the package e g HALCONROOT packages halconuser to the environment variable HALCONEXTENSIONS Note that the delimiter between paths in an environment variable is a semicolon on Windows NT 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 5 to access those images without specifying a complete path 2 6 2 Using an Extension Package Within HDevelop In order to use
86. n 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 gt 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 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 provid
87. nclude 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 NT 2000 file extension 1ib UNIX file extension 50 again in subdirectories corresponding to the different platforms e license The license file must be placed in this directory see section 2 4 2 3 Uninstallation 2 3 1 Uninstalling HALCON Under Windows NT 2000 There are three ways to uninstall HALCON depending on the revision of the HALCON system you want to uninstall and the revision of the setup program 1 e of the HALCON system you want to install afterwards Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 3 UNINSTALLATION 11 1 If the setup program stems from HALCON revisions 5 2 and newer Use the option that the setup program will show you automatically 1f you have old versions installed This is the preferred way since it avoids the problem with the path variable described below 2 If the HALCON installation you want to uninstall is newer than version 5 1 Select Start gt Programs gt MVTec HALCON pb Uninstall Halcon 3 In the system control panel choose Add Remove Programs Typically this is all you have to do If you encounter any problems please refer to section 6 3 2 If you want to uninstall a HALCON version older than 5 2 please check the paragraphs below
88. o wait Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 5 3 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON PARALLEL HALCON 99 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 sec tion 5 3 1 5 3 Additional Information This section contains additional information that helps you to use Parallel HALCON 5 3 1 How to Switch Off Reentrancy 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 pP 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
89. ons Institute at The Uni versity 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 and control data Iconic data 1s 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 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 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 4 2 HANDLING ICONIC AND CONTROL DATA 47 simultaneously on all tuple members For example 1f 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 ima
90. or e g reasonable succes sors possible alternatives cross references etc From revision 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 O0 HALCON comprehensive operator library supports efficient flexible image pro cessing and eases the development of image analysis programs HALCON s operator library contains more than 900 operators The operators can be used in any combination All HALCON applications e g HDevelop or HALCON C programs 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 2 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING HALCON instead of the whole task So the typical solution of an image analysis problem consists of a combination of several HALCON operators This concept allows much greater flexibility than others based on fewer but more complex operators that are specialize
91. perty 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 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 HALCON 6 0 70 CHAPTER 6 TIPS AND TRICKS Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 Index Aerial image interpretation 3 Area of definition 2 47 area_center 47 Assertions 46 Ball bondings 25 best_match 2 BP 33 Break point 28 33 C 1 3 46 Export of source code 3 C 1 3 46 Export of source code 3 Chord encoding 48 closing_circle 48 Color images 2 COM 1 3 46 Export of source code 3 Combo box 28 34 Contour 49 Control data 46 Cross references 61 Data Control 46 Exchange 4 Floating point numbers 46 Iconic 46 Image 47 Integers 46 Pixel 47 Strings 46 Debugging 1 3 28 61 DIGITAL UNIX 4 23 Dilation 49 Domain 47
92. r 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 O0 HALCON already provides interfaces to more than 30 frame grabbers HAL CON supports more than 30 frame grabbers the current list can be found at http www mvtec com halcon by providing interfaces to their SDKs If you use one of these frame grabbers all you need to to do establish a connection to it is to call the operator open_framegrabber pass it some parameters describing the desired mode for grabbing images Then you can grab images simply by calling the operator grab_image O0 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
93. re this location In figures 2 3 2 4 and 2 5 you find examples for the different types of license files for node locked licenses An example file for a floating license can be found in the following section HALCON 6 0 16 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH MVTec ID 0080c77161e2 HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 O FC17B37961F326F957A8 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 0080c77161e2 ck 23 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 Oi jan 0000 O CC279389F3566E1D6363 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID 0080c77161e2 ck 32 Figure 2 3 Nodelocked development license bound to computer PORORERR RRA RRE RO RORORRR ERROR RRA MVTec ID FLEXID 7 b285ff7f HHHRHHHRHHRRHHRRRHHHRHHRRHHHRHHHH FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 O 3C574319AF86C4A5DE4A VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID FLEXID 7 b285ff7f ck 35 FEATURE MVTec_HDevelop mvtecd 6 0 Oi jan 0000 O 7C772379E2D066930D10 VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID FLEXID b285ff 7f ck 245 Figure 2 4 Nodelocked development license bound to dongle HHEHHHHAAHHHERERHEAHHHRR RRR ER RRR MVTec ID FLEXID 7 b285ff7f HHEHHHHHAHHHHHERHEAHH HARE RRR RHEE FEATURE MVTec_Halcon mvtecd 6 0 01 jan 0000 O 3C574319AF86C4A5DE4A VENDOR_STRING 65535 HOSTID FLEXID b285ff 7f ck 35 Figure 2 5 Nodelocked runtime license bound to dongle As you can see a license contains the revision number of HALCON in the lines starting with
94. rted 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 Gust 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 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 Copy Cut and Paste commands which are also very convenient to edit a HDevelop program will be explained later during this session HALCON 6 0 30 CHAPTER 3 A FIRST LOOK AT HDEVELOP read_image Die die3 a A Operator lel x Operator read_image r Image Di
95. s Furthermore it describes HALCON s frame grabber interface 4 1 Modular Structure Applications Frame grabber Interface Extension Package Iconic Data Management Operator Knowledge Base Figure 4 1 Layered structure of HALCON The basis 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 45 46 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 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 interface 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 ar
96. s all operators that create or delete files display operators like open_window or disp_image 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 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 T O Under Windows NT use I O operators including graphics operators like open_window or disp_image only in the main thread otherwise you might get a deadlock 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 t
97. s 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 Al E Operator thresh v image object vw region object 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 is an ambiguity you choose the operator inside the combo box see Fig 3 6 For each HALCON operator the HDevelop 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 analysis 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 th
98. server You can obtain such a dongle from your local distributor The dongle will be delivered together with the corresponding license file 2 4 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 or Windows 2000 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 About HDevelop A HALCON Version 6 0 HDevelop Wersion 3 7 MYT ec Software GmbH Munich Germany AAA O tec corn 1996 2000 My Tec Software GmbH The hostide of this computer are network card ID UUel2358es6a DOO3 C1 DE 07E3 E79F FLEXID 36e79bd 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 1s not necessary as you will receive the license file already together with the
99. stallation process If this file has been removed you can get a copy of the file from the directory FLEX1mi586 nt4 on the HALCON CD Check if the registry entry for the uninstaller is set properly Start regedit exe for example from a DOS command prompt and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE gt SOFTWARE gt Microsoft gt Windows gt CurrentVersion gt Uninstall gt Halcon lt Version Number gt where lt Version Number gt is the version number of the HALCON version you want to uninstall or is not present There you should find a key named UninstallString The value of this string should be something like this C WINNT IsUninst exe f C Program Files MVTec Halcon Uninst isu c C Program Files MVTec Halcon FLEX1m i586 nt4 HalconUninst d11 Make sure that the path C Program Files MVTec Halcon or equivalent in the above example points to the HALCONROOTY directory Note that filenames 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 Close the registry editor and try to run the uninstaller again e Unistallation failed If the automatic uninstallation fails for another reason proceed as follows 1 For floating licenses only Uninstall the license manager service by executing HALC
100. 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 the x coordinates of 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 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 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 4 2 HANDLING ICONIC AND CONTROL DATA 49 a little fin see Fig 4 4 or cf the HDevelop program example fin2 dev under the path HALCONROOT 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 HALCON 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 r
101. structs a a wt Beh Eee Be we SG 4 Philosophy of HALCON A Modular SUCUS 22 24 pde iaa 4 2 Handling Iconic and Control Data 2 A ss EI Aziz Amare OBJEC we daw doe She he daria a AD Regiom CDJEC S i ici A A A As AA AMD IODECES o atraca a a B B a 4 3 The HALCON Frame Grabber Interface 4 3 1 The Two Modes of Grabbing Images 4 3 2 Using External Triggers 084 4 3 3 Volatile Image Grabbing 4 3 4 Using Frame Grabbers Without a HALCON Interface AA AUTOS 25 shoelace cae BG Be te a Bh T BA Sle ey AAA 5 Using Parallel HALCON 5 1 Automatic Parallelizati0n dll nittalizZauon ot amp 2 24 4 4 acc data a ad 5 1 2 The Three Methods of Automatic Parallelization 5 2 Parallel Programming 2 0 00 ee eee eens 5 2 1 A Closer Look at Reentrancy IL AENA oe rte e Bos we Be ve HA ees BIS Ss BG ds 5 3 Additional Information on Parallel HALCON 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 6 Tips and Tricks 6 1 Online HelpinHDevelop 6 2 Monitoring HALCON Programs with HALCON Spy 0 39 EOUDlESNOOUNE o se dere dai e Be Eo 6 3 1 Problems During Ins
102. supported by a HALCON frame grabber interface can be queried via the operator info_framegrabber For more information about the param eters please refer to the corresponding online documentation which can be found in the directory HALCONROOT doc htm1 manuals The html start page is also available from the HALCON folder in the Windows start menu If you did not install the documentation please take a look at the web site mentioned above 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 If you successfully installed your frame grabber all you need to do to access 1t from HALCON 1s to call the operator open_framegrabber specifying the name of the frame grabber and some additional information e g regarding the connected camera see the corresponding entry in Please refer to http www mvtec com halcon framegrabber for an up to date list Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 4 3 THE H
103. t of a user package Inconsistent version of the help files of this package e 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 3 5 Troubleshooting for Parallel HALCON e Parallel HALCON does not achieve any speedup If Parallel HALCON does not achieve any speedup on a multi processor hardware maybe 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 is 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 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 pro
104. tallation 6 3 2 Problems During Uninstallation 6 3 3 Problems Concerning Licenses 6 3 4 Troubleshooting in HDevelop 6 3 5 Troubleshooting for Parallel HALCON 6 3 6 Miscellaneous Problems Index Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 Contents 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 more than 900 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 Windows 2000 and many UNIX platforms In addition under Windows NT and Windows 2000 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 hardware 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 operat
105. tation 1 3 Introducing Parallel HALCON To put it in a nutshell standard HALCON is optimized for running sequential programs on single processor boards Under Windows NT Windows 2000 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 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 gt Note that in order to use HALCON s
106. temporary license from you distributor free of charge 2 1 Installation This section describes how to install HALCON from CD the WWW installation is basically the same However the installed file groups have been adapted to limit the bandwidth needed 7 8 CHAPTER 2 INSTALLATION LICENSING CONFIGURATION for the download Most of the work is done by the provided 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 HALCONROOT 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 5 for more information on environment variables The same expression in UNIX convention would look like HALCONROOT examples extension_package halconuser 2 1 1 Installing HALCON Under Windows NT 2000 To install HALCON on Windows NT or Windows 2000 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 intel of the CD Please note that you need administrator privileges in order to install HALCON The installation wizard allows to specify whether you would like to install e the full HALCON packa
107. 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 three 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 0 42 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 Bal1ROI contains only regions Thus we have to add an image that is gray values to the objects prior to the final
108. 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 window will be opened containing all the elements of the tuple 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 0
109. 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 Alternatively you can convert your own images to HALCON images by passing HAL CON a pointer to the image buffer using the operator gen_image1_extern O0 HALCON may easily be extended by new operators COM is a Microsoft standard for component based software programs written in COM can be used in envi ronments such as Visual Basic Visual C or Delphi HALCON 6 0 4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING HALCON Although HALCON already contains more than 900 operators for various tasks you may wish to implement a new one e g in order to access a special hardware or to 1m plement an alternative algorithm To do so HALCON provides the Extension Package Interface that allows the integration of new operators implemented in C It contains several predefined routines and macros for the easy handling of image data and mem ory objects in C Once a new operator has been successfully integrated 1t can be used like any other HALCON operator The Extension Package Programmer s Manual contains detailed information about extending the operator library O0 HALCON allows continued application of already implemented image processing software Software engineering 1s a time consuming process and in most cases expensive as well So everyone 1s interested in using already implemented softwar
110. tored 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 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 for more than 30 frame grabbers in form of dynam ically loadable libraries Windows NT 2000 DLLs UNIX shared libraries These libraries are installed together with the HALCON libraries see section 2 2 for the file structure Li brary names start with the prefix HFG the libraries starting with parHFG are used by Parallel HALCON see also section 5 3 2 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 1s 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
111. tory HALCONROOT doc html manuals or under http www mvtec com halcon framegrabber If a grab runs into a timeout the corre sponding 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 1ts 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 view 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
112. 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 To set an environment variable under Windows NT open the dialog Start gt Settings gt Control Panel gt System and select Environment There you can enter the name of a variable and the desired value If a value consists of multiple items as e g the variable PATH which may contain multiple directories those items must be separated by semicolons 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 2 5 1 Configuring HALCON Under Windows NT 2000 The installation program Setup exe automatically sets the necessary environment variables e g AHALCONROOT 4HALCONIMAGES 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 e HALCONROOT This is 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 HALCONROOT help
113. with a message like Internal Error unable to load or call external DLL Please contact your distributor for more information the most likely reason 1s 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 4HALCONROOT was changed manually You have to follow the following steps to recover from the error 1 Check if the environment variable 4HALCONROOT matches the location of your HALCON directory You can check this via the system control panel System look for Environment or in a DOS 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 two files are present e In your HALCONROOTY directory Uninst isu e Inthe directory HALCONROOTY FLEX1mi586 nt4 HalconUninst d11 Note that by default the Windows NT Explorer doesn t show DLL files unless you explicitly tell it to do so Uninst isu has been created during the instal lation If this file has been removed an automatic uninstallation is not possible 2For HALCON 5 0 and 5 1 this DLL was called CSUninst d11 Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 6 3 TROUBLESHOOTING 65 4 HalconUninst dl1 is a HALCON specific DLL for the unin
114. ws see figure 3 2 e a program window e an operator window e a variable 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 1s the central window and the starting point for your work It comprises the creation of a 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 2000 11 16 3 1 THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE OF HDEVELOP 27 HDevelop OF x File Edit Execute Visualization Uperstors Suggestions Window Help osk ejeloj Leet epale El Belle 5 l Operator Op Variable Watch olx B Ico Graphics Window olx 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
115. xample 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 visualization the last iconic object that was drawn into the currently active graphics window is redisplayed Fig 3 4 Therefore you need only re display 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 Fig 3 4 Just use draw_region from the menu Operators gt Graphics gt Drawing instead of the sequence draw_rectanglel and gen_rectanglel draw_region ROI WindowID To adapt the program in this way you may select the line draw_rectanglel 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 1s 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 fro
116. xecutable HALCON programs e g hdevelop reside in HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE It is therefore useful to include the path HALCONROOT bin ARCHITECTURE in the environment variable PATH of a shell script Shared libraries reside in the directory SHALCONROOT 1ib ARCHITECTURE The following table gives an overview of the currently supported UNIX platforms and the corresponding values of ARCHITECTURE Operating System Platform Linux 2 2 on Intel Pentium or compatible e LD_LIBRARY_PATH and SHLIB_PATH Please include the HALCON library path HALCONROOT 1ib ARCHITECTURE in the system variable SHLIB_PATH on a HP UX architecture and in the system variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH on all other UNIX architectures respectively This is necessary both for running HDevelop and for creating stand alone applications now called Tru64 UNIX Getting Started with HALCON 2000 11 16 2 6 INTEGRATING A HALCON EXTENSION PACKAGE 21 HALCONEXTENSIONS This 1s a list of directories in which user defined extension operators so called 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 6 for information on how to install an extension package and the Extension Package Pro erammer s Manual for details on creating your own extension packages HALCONSPY If this environment variable is defined regardless of the value before
117. 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 4HALCONSPY 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 2 DISPLAY The system uses this environment variable to open windows It is used in the same way as for other X applications 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 Typically the definition of these environment variables belongs to a start shell script like cshrc or profile 2 6 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 Integrating a HALCON Extension Package The HALCON Extension Package Interface allows to integrate newly developed image process ing algorithms into HALCON i

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