Obviously, the acquisition of images is a task to be solved in all machine vision applications. Unfortu- nately, this task mainly consists of interacting with special, non-standardized hardware in form of image acquisition devices, i.e., cameras or frame grabber boards. To let you concentrate on the actual machine vision problem, HALCON already provides interfaces performing this interaction for a large number of image acquisition devices (seesection 1 on page1).

Within your HALCON application, the task of image acquisition is thus reduced to a few lines of code, i.e., a few operator calls, as can be seen insection 2 on page2. What\u2019s more, this simplicity is not achieved at the cost of limiting the available functionality: Using HALCON, you can acquire images from various con\ufb01gurations of frame grabbers and cameras (seesection 3 on page4) in different timing modes (seesection 5 on page14).

programs are precon\ufb01gured to work with a certain HALCON acquisition interface; in this case, the name of the program contains the name of the interface. To use the program with another image acquisition device, please adapt the parts which open the connection to the device. More example programs for the different HALCON acquisition interfaces can be found in the subdirectoryhde-

Please refer to the Programmer\u2019s Guide,chapter 7 on page61 andchapter 18 on page141, for information about how to compile and link the C++ and C example programs; among other things, they describe how to use the example UNIX make\ufb01les which can be found in the subdirectoriesc andcpp of the directory

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

4.1 GeneralParameters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 4.2 SpecialParameters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 4.3 Fixed vs. Dynamic Parameters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

5.1 Real-Time Image Acquisition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 5.2 Using an External Trigger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 5.3 Acquiring Images From Multiple Cameras. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

6.1 Acquiring Images From Unsupported Image Acquisition Devices. . . . . . . . . . . . .27 6.2 ErrorHandling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28 6.3 Line Scan Cameras. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

A.1 The Philosophy of HALCON Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36 A.2 Image Tuples (Arrays). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 A.3 HALCON Operators for Handling Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37

B.1 ImageSize. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 B.2 Frames vs. Fields. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 B.3 ImageData. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43