MVTec.HALCON v17.2 MVTec HALCON is the comprehensive standard software for machine vision with an integrated development environment (HDevelop) that is used worldwide. It enables cost savings and improved time to market. HALCON’s flexible architecture facilitates rapid development of any kind of machine vision application. MVTec HALCON provides outstanding performance and a comprehensive support of multi-core platforms and special instruction sets like AVX2 or NEON, as well as GPU acceleration. It serves all industries (including the industrial internet of things), with a library used in hundreds of thousands of installations in all areas of imaging like blob analysis, morphology, matching, measuring, identification, and 3D vision. Inspecting specular reflecting surfaces imposes special challenges, because the observer does not see the surface itself, but the mirror image of the environment. This poses significant problems for most surface inspection methods such as triangulation or shape from shading, because these usually rely on diffuse reflection. HALCON 17.12 includes new operators, which enable the user to inspect specular and partially specular surfaces to detect defects by applying the principle of deflectometry. This method uses the aforementioned specular reflections by observing mirror images of known patterns and their deformations on the surface. Automatic Text Reader HALCON 17.12 features an improved version of the automatic text reader, which now detects and separates touching characters more robustly. Surface Fusion For Multiple 3D Point Clouds HALCON now offers a new method that fuses multiple 3D point clouds into one watertight surface. This new method is able to combine data from various 3D sensors, even from different types like a stereo camera, a time of flight camera, and fringe projection. This technology is especially useful for reverse engineering. HDevEngine Improvements With the new HDevelop library export included in HALCON 17.12, calling HDevelop procedures from C++ is as easy and intuitive as calling any other C++ function. This new library export also generates CMake projects, which can easily be configured to output project files for many popular IDEs, such as Visual Studio.