Where’s Halcon now?

I consider Halcon one of the top tier of machine vision software products. It’s up there with Sapera, Common Vision Blox, and of course, VisionPro.

And there’s the problem. As part of their patent infringement action against MVTec, Cognex have an application before the US International Trade Commission (ITC) to block the sale of Halcon in the US. As a result, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to play with some of the novel Halcon configurations that the gentlemen in Germany are working on.

First up is Halcon embedded on a Beagleboard (see picture.) A Beagleboard is a single board computer utilizing a Texas Instruments processor. I can imagine hooking it to a USB camera to create a rather useful stand-alone vision system – the kind of thing that could be incorporated into a piece of factory automation. I also have to wonder if this means I could run Halcon on those rather nice smart cameras from Vision Components.

Second, MVTec have also configured Halcon to run on a Nokia cellphone (see second picture.) I will admit that my first reaction was, “why?” Having thought about it though, I think there is value in a portable machine vision system, even if only for OCR and bar code reading. I can imagine the Halcon-equipped Nokia being used by anyone who needs to acquire data while in the field – meter-reading would only be the beginning.

All this leads me to wonder, wherever will we see Halcon next? More importantly, will we ever see it in the USA?