Speedup With version 12, HALCON utilizes AVX2, thus running significantly faster on state-of-the-art processors. Further speedup is achieved in HDevelop and HDevEngine where the execution of procedures has become considerably faster by utilizing a just-in-time compiler. 3D vision 3D Vision With the new local deformable surfaced-based matching, bent or stretched objects like pretzels can be found reliably, thus expanding the possibilities of 3D vision applications. Furthermore, HALCON's surfaced-based 3D matching in version 12 has become more robust when processing noisy image data, e.g., from time-of-flight cameras. IDE IDE HALCON's highly interactive programming environment (IDE) HDevelop has been enhanced with support of parallel programming and thus allows concurrency. For this, HALCON 12 now also supports event-based processing. As a special key feature for software developers, a new extension allows to inspect HALCON variables (tuples and iconic) directly within Visual Studio, thus easing debugging tasks tremendously. automatic text reader Identification HALCON 12 eases OCR applications with a new technology for automatic text reading. Characters of any size are found robustly, in most cases without the need to adjust parameters. The new technology has an impressive capability to distinguish characters from background texture even under challenging conditions, such as distorted characters. easier 3d camera calibration Usability HALCON 12 contains many features for further improving the usability. One example is the camera calibration: By means of its new calibration plates, the improved camera calibration of HALCON 12 reaches the same accuracy by using considerably fewer images. Furthermore, it is no longer necessary that the new calibration plates are completely visible in the image. Further New Features Camera calibration for Scheimpflug optics Hand-eye calibration for SCARA robots Improved usability of sheet-of-light calibration Support of vector variables Visualization of tuples as 1D or 2D plots from variable window Calculation of the pointwise distance of two contours New operators for bead inspection Support of digital I/O boards Interfaces to PLC control systems using the OPC UA and OPC Classic standards More robust recognition and reading of bar codes that are damaged or of poor quality Reading bar codes with small module size is twice as robust Assessment of direct mark quality of ECC 200 data codes, compliant with the SEMI T10-0701 standard New operator to simplify triangulated 3D object models Stereo reconstruction with multi-scanline optimization More robust sample-based identification with respect to cluttered background and illumination changes 3D scene flow Speedup of several operators Improved interface for 3D visualization Message queues for inter-thread communication Speedup of subpixel operators New HDevelop start dialog And much more ...