MVTec is launching the Halcon 12 release on the market. The tool uses multi-core processors as well as MMX, SSE2 and GPU acceleration and, according to the manufacturer, is significantly faster from version 12 onwards thanks to the use of the AVX2 instruction set. The performance of selected operators has been improved, increasing their speed by up to five times. Further acceleration is achieved in 'HDevelop' and the 'HDevEngine'. A so-called JIT (just-in-time) compiler automatically translates the HDevelop code into machine code. The software allows parallel programming for concurrent applications via its interactive programming environment (IDE) 'HDevelop' and supports event-based processing for this purpose. With the 'Visual Studio Extension', tuples or iconic variables from Halcon can be checked directly in Visual Studio, which simplifies troubleshooting. The software also facilitates the implementation of applications for optical character recognition (OCR). The portfolio of 3D vision methods supports all aspects of 3D vision technology such as 3D reconstruction, 3D registration and 3D object processing. With the help of locally deformable, surface-based matching, the 3D position and orientation of objects whose shape can vary can be reliably determined.