Software for Machine Vision

What is Machine Vision? Machine vision is deployed where camera images are not only acquired, but must also be analyzed in real time: for manufacturing, quality control, traffic control, medical technology, and surveillance. Machine vision is a multi-purpose technology , which currently shows the highest growth in the machinery industry. Software plays the central role. High-quality software can compensate the disturbances and weaknesses of an application. Who needs Machine Vision? Anybody who must mass-produce goods. Anybody who would like to automatize his production. Anybody who wants 100% quality for his entire production. Anybody who strives for improvements in medical image analysis. Anybody who monitors traffic. Anybody who must guarantee security. What is Software for Machine Vision? Software is the core of any machine vision application. Illumination highlights an object. Cameras transform images into electronic signals. Computers process the images. It is machine vision software, however, that analyzes and interprets this data. Machine vision software transforms image data into measurable and interpretable quantities, the basis for decisions. Here, speed, robustness, and accuracy are essential criteria. What are the Features of good Machine Vision Software? Functionality - to address sophisticated applications Robustness - against various distortions Accuracy - regarding real world coordinates High performance High image - and pixel resolution User-friendliness Flexibility by a huge number of methods hardware compatibility support of different systems and programming environments open interfaces support and training Adaptivity to changing customer requirements

ActivVisionTools is the outstanding result of MVTec's expert knowledge in machine vision: a quick and efficient application creator with an easy-to-use graphical interface. By directly supporting digital I/O boards and interfaces to more than 50 frame grabbers and hundreds of industrial cameras, ActivVisionTools is integrable into any production process. ActivVisionTools' open software architecture is exten- sible and scalable to always fit your needs. Several tools such as ActivOCR, ActivBarcode, ActivMeasure, ActivAlignment, ActivBlobFinder, are based on the established HALCON library.

HALCON is the comprehensive standard software with an integrated development environment (IDE) for machine vision that is used worldwide. It leads to cost savings and improved time to market: HALCON's flexible architecture facilitates rapid development of machine vision, medical imaging, and image analysis applications. HALCON provides outstanding performance and a comprehensive support of multi-core platforms, MMX, and SSE2. It serves all industries by a library of more than 1400 operators for blob analysis, morphology, pattern matching, measuring, identification, and 3D vision, to name just a few. HALCON secures your investment by supporting a wide range of operating systems and providing interfaces to hundreds of industrial cameras and frame grabbers, including GenICam, GigE Vision, and IIDC 1394.

MVTec's Expertise MVTec Software GmbH, based in Munich, Germany, employs highly qualified experts for machine vision with up to 20 years experience in this technology. Since the early days of machine vision, MVTec engineers were groundbreaking inventors. In the course of time, their developments received numerous international scientific awards. MVTec started as a spin-off from Technische Universität München in 1996. Today there is still a close collaboration to scientific research and development. MVTec invests a large part of its profits into its own R & D activities. New software releases are brought into the market regularly. MVTec's machine vision software is globally distributed and applied by industry and scientific research worldwide. MVTec cooperates directly with customers by implementing customized solutions for sophisticated machine vision problems. MVTec's worldwide customer support via distributors helps users to optimize their own machine vision application.