On the second day of the SPS trade fair on November 9, Dr. Olaf Munkelt, Managing Director of MVTec Software, and Dr. Martin Schenk, Senior Vice President Product Management at Sick, signed the contract that deepens their cooperation, which has existed for around ten years. From now on, Sick's automation solutions will also be available with MVTec's standard software library Halcon.

"With the closer strategic cooperation now concluded, we are bringing the strengths of the two worlds of sensor technology and machine vision even closer together. The beneficiaries of the solution from a single source are clearly the users," explains Munkelt.

Sick is a solution provider for sensor-based applications for industrial applications. MVTec, in turn, is a provider of software for industrial machine vision with its Halcon, Merlic and Deep Learning software products.

Halcon becomes part of Sick's ECO system

The integration of MVTec's Halcon into Sick's programming ECO system provides the answer to the automation industry's increased demands for flexibility and performance. "...our OEMs and integrators [can] participate in Halcon's extensive developments. In particular, our quality control systems benefit from the possibilities Halcon offers, for example with OCR and other image processing algorithms," says Dr. Martin Schenk, Senior Vice President Product Management.

"Machine vision becomes the eye of production"

Sick and MVTec have already been working together since 2015. It is the declared goal of both companies to jointly advance technological developments in the automation industry by contributing their own strengths. "By combining classic methods of image processing and new deep learning technologies, industrial machine vision is giving the entire automation industry a technological boost. Increasingly powerful embedded systems are also contributing to this. Machine vision is thus increasingly becoming the eye of production. And we at MVTec supply the appropriate software for this," says Munkelt. 

With Halcon, MVTec offers software that is tailored to the needs of industrial PCs as well as embedded devices such as sensors. This ensures that the software achieves optimum performance on all platforms. At the same time, the software supports all relevant interfaces and thus enables fast implementation and high compatibility within the embedded devices.