Preface : In almost all modern industrial automated production processes, including automobile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, electronics, packaging, printing, tobacco, daily chemicals, building materials, coinage, and card manufacturing, various inspection, production monitoring, and part identification applications are involved. Examples include batch processing of automotive parts, terminal size inspection, SMT assembly, and IC character recognition. Typically, these highly repetitive and intelligent tasks can only be performed by the human eye. However, sometimes, such as precise and rapid measurement of minute dimensions, shape matching, and color recognition, it is simply impossible for humans to perform these tasks continuously and stably with the naked eye, rendering other physical sensors ineffective. Vision Dragon Technology, a company specializing in providing image processing and machine vision software and comprehensive solutions for demanding users, has been committed to promoting machine vision automation and has achieved remarkable results and reputation in the industry, making significant contributions to the development of these industries. We can provide you with a variety of high-speed, high-precision, compact, flexible, and easy-to-use standard and non-standard automatic identification and inspection systems that can accurately measure, locate, identify, and inspect products at high speeds. These systems can determine the inspection results themselves and transmit process information to other devices in the factory network. This system supports multiple communication protocols, enabling direct communication with computers and other devices. Parameters can be easily modified and optimized during on-site debugging. It is powerful, mature, and practical, setting it apart in the industry. What is HexSight? Produced by Adept, HexSight is a high-performance, comprehensive vision software development kit that provides stable, reliable, and accurate low-level machine vision functions for locating and inspecting parts. Its powerful positioner tools can accurately identify and locate objects, regardless of rotation or changes in size. HexSight delivers reliable inspection results even in the harshest working environments, demonstrating exceptional performance. The HexSight software includes a complete low-level machine vision function library, allowing programmers to build complete high-performance 2D machine vision systems, saving development time. HexSight can be easily further developed using Visual Basic, Visual C++, or Borland Delphi platforms. HexSight's History: HexSight originated as a Quebec-based company in Canada specializing in machine vision algorithm development. HexSight was the world's first vision software to achieve 1/40th of a pixel accuracy. Its characteristics include high precision, fast positioning and recognition speed, insensitivity to ambient light interference, and extremely high detection reliability. Consequently, it was acquired by the renowned American robotics company Adept in July 2000. Since its initial release in 1999 (Release 1.0), HexSight software has now reached Release 3.3. HexSight's Positioning Technology : HexSight's positioning tools utilize state-of-the-art contour detection technology based on geometric features to identify objects and patterns. This technology is highly effective in handling cluttered images, brightness fluctuations, image blur, and object overlap. HexSight can handle free-form objects and possesses a powerful deblurring algorithm. HexSight is fast; on a 2GHz processor, typical part finding and positioning takes less than 10ms, achieving 1/40th of a pixel positional repeatability and 0.01-degree rotational repeatability. Furthermore, HexSight offers a rich yet easy-to-use image calibration toolkit, and its locators can be easily embedded into OEM products. (Visual Dragon Technology/Li Yongzhen 13556894747) What are the new features in the latest version, Ver3.3? A. Machine vision tools are encapsulated as ActiveX controls or C++ libraries. B. Compatible with Windows 2000/XP, DevStudio 6.0, DevStudio .NET, etc. C. Open architecture, compatible with commercial image acquisition cards and cameras. D. Complete inspection tools. E. All HexSight tools are available through C++ libraries. F. Compatible with DevStudio .NET: Visual Basic, C++, C#. G. New Basic and Advanced Locator property setting modes. H. Further improved Locator speed and increased Locator's versatility for complex systems. I. Added application examples for integrating HexSight into OEM projects. J. Ver 4.0 will also have some exciting new features, such as color difference recognition and 3D locators. What is the core competitiveness of free upgrades to HexSight? Speed, Accuracy, and Performance: A. Translation repeatability: 1/40 subpixel; B. Rotation repeatability: 0.01 (1/100) degrees; C. Fast parallel processing with MMS and SSE extension technologies; D. Built-in calibration module: corrects distortion, projection errors, and XY pixel ratio errors; E. Image-based calibration is intrinsically used by all vision tools; F. Unique and powerful software engine for finding and locating parts based on object contours or edges; G. Tolerates overlap, shadows, low contrast, blurry edges, clutter, or background noise. HexSight offers three supply options : First, for applications requiring only part positioning (such as robot pick & place, sorting, and part assembly), a single module primarily containing the HexSight positioner is available. Second, for complex and comprehensive inspections (such as part inspection and measurement), a full version of HexSight is offered. Third, for OEM applications, a customized version is available, including seamless integration with image capture devices and specialized positioning tools. The positioner-only module is widely accepted due to its suitability for many applications and reasonable price. It includes the following tools: ★ Image capture device: In addition to importing, displaying, and storing images from the image acquisition card to HexSight, it also includes automatic calibration tools to compensate for errors caused by lens perpendicularity and distortion. Seamless integration with commonly used acquisition cards from well-known image acquisition card suppliers such as Coreco Imaging, Data Translation, Imagenation, Matrox, MRT, and Optron, as well as IEEE-1394 digital cameras, is easily achieved. ★ Object Locator: Features automatic adjustment and learning capabilities, locating parts based on geometric contours and returning XY coordinates, orientation, size ratio, and user-defined reference point coordinates. The search area can be limited to a user-defined ROI (Region of Interest). ★ Library: A collection of ActiveX plugins enabling customized systems to manipulate internal images. In addition to the three tools mentioned above, the full HexSight package includes the following tools: ★ Image Processing Tools: Provides diverse image processing algorithms, such as arithmetic operations, logical operations, morphological transformations, and histograms. Image processing can occur before or after any tool. ★ Edge Location Tool: Locates multiple edges using rectangular or circular projection. ★ Pattern Location Tool: Employs customizable pattern matching algorithms to find grayscale patterns, improving speed and accuracy. ★ Measurement Tool: Measures linear and circular features. ★ Blob Analysis Tool: Calculates intrinsic and extrinsic geometric properties, such as centroid, perimeter, area, envelope rectangle, principal axis, and grayscale attributes. Supports three image binarization methods: binary, soft binary, and dynamic thresholding. ★ Sampling Tool: Extremely useful for customizable detection, it samples image data from a template-based ROI (Region of Interest) and then feeds it to a specific C++ algorithm or any HexSight tool, including a locator, for processing. ★ Image Sharpness Evaluation Tool: Evaluates/calculates the sharpness of images within a user-defined ROI, ideal for autofocus system control. ★ Image Histogram Tool: Calculates statistics on image grayscale values ​​within a user-defined ROI. Application Development Because HexSight's functionality is provided as a standard ActiveX control, it greatly simplifies application development and allows for application development on multiple platforms, such as Visual Basic or Visual C++. Simple development steps, allowing you to see the results while writing code—what you see is what you get; HexSight's pre-built configuration window allows for prototyping applications without writing any code; Common functions such as display control are encapsulated and provided, further simplifying application development.