Release Notes: Adaptive Vision Studio 4.9

2018.04.23

HMI Controls in Studio and in AVL.NET

• New: Our special HMI controls, such as ZoomingVideoBox, AnalogIndicator or OnOffButton, are now available for use with AVL.NET. It becomes more straightforward to port an application from Studio to a C# project.
• Changed: Mouse Up and Down events have been modified in VideoBox controls to better correspond to standard Windows controls.
• New: There are new outputs in the ZoomingVideoBox control: outLeftClick, outMouseMove.
• New: User Types became supported in .NET Macrofilter Interfaces.
• New: DLL files of .NET Macrofilter Interfaces can now be versioned and signed. This makes it possible to use them in signed applications.

3D Machine Vision

• New: Support for Gocator's "Sections" have been added.
• New: Shape fitting filters, well known from our 2D library, are now also available in 3D.
• New: Profile data can now include information about offset and scale on the X axis. This makes it possible to represent 3D scans in real-world units.
• Changed: Gocator_GrabResampledProfile now returns a Profile instead of Point2DArray.
• New: New basic filters: RemoveInvalidPoints3D, CropSurfaceByPlaneProximity, CropSurfaceByNeighborsProximity, GetSurfacePoint, GetSurfaceElement. (*)
• New: Point clouds can be loaded from .STL and .PLY files. (*)
• New: 3D data previews can now be switched to orthogonal projections. (*)
• New: Regions can be visualized on 3D data previews as open-base prisms. (*)
• New: Paths can be visualized on 3D data previews as curved vertical walls. (*)
• Improved: Toolbox structure has been revised after we finished implementing all the basic 3D filters. (*)
• Changed: By default 3D data get colored along the vertical axis (Y or Z depending on a setting).

Results window and inspection status

• New: There is a new window, Results, that displays for filters seleted in the Program Editor:
  
• • Name, Type and current Value,
  • Limits, current Pass/Fail indications and Pass/Fail statistic,
  • Statistics such as: minimum, maximum, average, median and scewness.
• New: Each filter's output, as well as the filter itself, can now have a .Status property (Bool type) which indicates the inspection result (Pass or Fail).

Regions of interest

• New: There is a new type of data, named RegionOfInterest, which is an union of rectangle, circle, polygon and region. It makes it easier to: (a) use geometrical primitives as regions-of-interests (no need to use CreateRectangleRegion and similar filters), (b) draw basic regions-of-interest in the editor, (c) handle regions-of-interests in the HMI.

New and improved tools

• Improved: Image and region morphological operations have been significantly speeded up.
• Improved: Some image drawing filtres have been significantly speeded up.
• Changed: The filters for locating image local extrema had several outputs. These outputs have been merged into structures and now these filters have only one output.
• Fixed: GetArrayElement_OrNil filter was throwing a DomainError in a scenario with inInvers=True instead of returning a Nil value. (*)
• Changed: Some filter names appeared weird and we changed them or made shorter:
• • MergeWithDefault -> MergeDefault
  • JoinArrays_OfArray -> FlattenArray
  • JoinArrays_OfLoop -> AccumulateArray
  • LastMultipleObjects -> AccumulateElements
• Fixed: CombineSpatialMaps was creating some artifacts. Now it is all smooth. (*)
• Changed: Filters PointOnLineProjection and similar have been renamed to ProjectPointOnLine (and similar) to keep with general conventions.
• Improved: Our Data Matrix reader has been extended with inContrastPerturbations parameter that allows for checking different parameters for more reliable detection. (*)
• Improved: Long-running data matrix detection can now be cancelled (in the development environment). (*)
• Improved: 2D Edge Detection filters have been significantly optimized for UINT8 pixels.
• New: Dynamic thresholding is now possible also with Median and Middle filtering (was: only with Mean).
• Improved: PCA filters have been revised. Now we have three: (Create/Apply/Reverse)PCATransform.
• Improved: 2D Edge Detection filters have been significantly speeded up and improved for noisy images.
• Improved: There is a new filter for easy conversion from image to real distances: PixelToRealDistance. It supports a constant bias as an additional parameter.
• Improved: The ProfileSections filter has got new inputs for setting min/max gap or section widths.
• Improved: The ResizeImage filter has been optimized for integer scaling factors.

Other

• Improved: Region, Path and Profile data are now returned from filters without copying of the internal data buffers. This optimizes performance and memory usage.
• Fixed: Adaptive Vision Executor does not prevent Windows system shutdown anymore. (*)
• Fixed: User filters did not define NDEBUG definition in the Release mode.
• New: User types can now be used in formula blocks.
• Fixed: The documentation for AVL.NET was generated incorrectly in some places resulting in mismatch between entries and their descriptions.
• New: Visual Studio 2017 is now supported for creating User Filters. (*)
• Improved: Adaptive Vision Library for Linux has gone through a major revise. A number of compatibility problems with various libraries and systems were solved. (*)
• New: Some additional types of data (Edge1D, Stripe1D, Ridge1D, StringLabel) are supported in the View2DBox control. (*)
• New: It is possible to display numerical values with more than three decimal points.
• Improved: AVEXE files are now protected with a stronger encryption algorithm.

Licensing

• New: It is now possible to have one license with a "factor" number run multiple programs created with Adaptive Vision Library.
• Changed: License names have been revised for better clarity as follows:
• • StudioProfessional (was: Professional)
  • StudioRuntime (was: Runtime)
  • StudioSmart (was: Smart)
  • LibraryProfessional (was: Library)
  • LibraryRuntime (was: LibraryRuntime)
• Improved: License keys based on computer-id were redesigned for increased security.
• Improved: License keys based on computer-id are now based on Base32 encoding, which is more human-friendly.

Hardware support

• New: Cameras from Thorlabs(R) are now supported through the manufacturers SDK. (*)
• Improved: Support for PointGrey cameras through the Spinnaker SDK has been updated. (*)
• Improved: Support for NET's iCube SDK has been updated. (*)
• New: Support for Lumerena cameras has been added.
• New: Support for HikVision cameras has been added.
• New: Support for Ensenso 3D sensors has been added.
• Fixed: There was a mismatch between RGB and BGR color spaces in support for the Imaging Source cameras. (*)

Embedded

• New: Adaptive Vision Library (C++) is now available for nVidia簧 Jetson platform and for the ARMv8a architecture in general.

Deep Learning Add-on

• New: Added a new Network Type for Unsupervised mode, named Texture, designed specially for detecting anomalies on materials with repetitive pattern.
• New: There is a new tool, DeepLearning_ClassifyObject, which analyses an entire image and decides which type of an object there is.
• Changed: To avoid confusion with classification, the DeepLearning_ClassifyFeatures fillter was renamed to DeepLearning_DetectFeatures.
• New: It is possible to set elliptical Region of Interest during training in Deep Learning Editor.
• Improved: The Training Progress window shows more information and allows for better preview of the training process.
• Improved: Training is almost fully interruptible in the preparation phase.
• New: Chart on the Training Progress window contains information about validation process from an already existing model (if any).
  
• New: A newly trained model no longer overwrites a previous model automatically. Now, the user has to decide whether to save the new model or not. This decision can be made on the basis of comparison of validation results with the previous ones (see above).
  
• New: A mechanism for checking compatibility with the version of Deep Learning Service was added. Using a too old Adaptive Vision Studio or Deep Learning Service will result in an error message.
• New: Added a new preprocessing operation: downsampling. It shortens the execution time significantly.
• Improved: Training and classification using Region of Interest is faster and leads to better results.
• Improved: Training in the Supervised mode with multiple classes has been improved.
  
• Changed: Heatmaps from Deep Learning filters always have one channel now.
• Changed: All samples in the Unsupervised use the same Region of Interest (defined during training).
• Improved: The Unsupervised classification gives results with much better quality. (*)
  
• Improved: Increased maximum size of image (after downsampling) being able to process.
• Fixed: Handling file path and directories with non-ASCII characters.
• Fixed: Running multiple Deep Learning filters does not worsen performance anymore.
• Changed: Removed "Validation Set Size" parameter - size of validation set is calculated automatically by Deep Learning Service instead.
• Improved: Inference has been significantly speeded up.
• All already trained models should work with new Deep Learinng Add-on. However, to achieve best results, re-training is strongly advised.

(*) These features were also added to latest revision of version 4.8.