VTK Applications
This page was based on Sebastien Barre's VTK Links: Applications page.
VTK-based applications or products. Some of them might give you a good overview of VTK and how to use it. Your own VTK work is definitely welcome here.
Slicer, or 3D Slicer, is a free, open source software package for visualization and image analysis. 3D Slicer is natively designed to be available on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac Os X. Slicer is a community platform created for the purpose of subject-specific image analysis and visualization. Features include: (a) Multi-modality imaging including, MRI, CT, US, nuclear medicine, and microscopy; (b) Multi organ from head to toe; (c) Bidirectional interface for devices; and (d) Expandable and interfaced to multiple toolkits
BioImageXD is a collaborative open source free software project, designed and developed by microscopists, cell biologists and programmers from the Universities of Jyväskylä and Turku in Finland, Max Planck Institute CBG, Dresden, Germany and collaborators worldwide. It is platform independent and works on any operating system with wxPython: eg. Linux, Windows and OSX. It also uses ITK.
OSIRIX : 3D DICOM Viewer PACS workstation for MacOS X, based on VTK
OsiriX is an image processing software dedicated to DICOM images. Osirix is at the same time a DICOM PACS workstation for medical imaging and an image processing software for medical research (radiology and nuclear imaging), functional imaging, 3D imaging, confocal microscopy and molecular imaging.
Visualizing Diffpack simulation results in VTK
(X. Cai, Univ. of Oslo) Diffpack has been extended with VTK to yield a new and powerful simulation and analysis tool. It demonstrates how to filter general Diffpack data into specific VTK data formats (vtkStructuredGrid and vtkUnstructuredGrid). The same object-oriented software design philosophy used in both Diffpack and VTK enables straightforward coupling (on the source code level) to achieve interactive simulation and visualization.
Data Visualization Architect 3.0
Data Visualization Architect 3.0 provides a graphical pipeline editor for the widely used and popular Visualization Toolkit (VTK) by encapsulating the VTK C++ classes and providing graphical equivalents. Connections are made by simply clicking on the source graphical component and dragging the connector to the target graphical component. Visualization Architect works in conjunction with the latest release build of VTK (4.2) and and will be updated to use version 4.4 when that becomes an official release.
VTK Designer is a graphical tool for creating and manipulating VTK pipelines. It provides access to VTK object via wrappers; and performs connections using these wrappers. It has been implemented in Qt; and it used VTK to render visualization pipelines. You can create VTK pipelines visually, edit properties and check their impact on the fly, add your own VTK classes to VTK Designer via wrappers and plugins, generate C++ code of the pipeline, save and retreive piplines into VDF files, create large pipelines using pipeline parts, use vdf2cpp command line utility to convert pipelines to C++ code from stored VDF files.
Comprehensive User and Developer Manuals explain every aspect of VTK Designer's implementation.
To download VTK Designer visit http://www.prashanthudupa.com/vtkdesigner
Volumetric Modeling of Acoustic Fields in CNMAT's Sound Spatialization Theatre
(S. Khoury, A. Freed and D. Wessel, CNMAT) The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California Berkeley has developed a system for real-time simulation and visualization of acoustic fields. The purpose of the software is to help design the placement of speakers and control sound processing to create as large a acoustic "sweet spot" as possible. VTK was used in a custom acoustic design application.
OpenSoundEdit: An Interactive Visualization and Editing Framework for Timbral Resources
(A. Chaudhary, CNMAT, Berkeley) "The emergence of real-time audio synthesis on desktop computer systems is providing musicians and sound designers with richer and more complex control over sounds. These sounds are specified by different representations, including time-domain waveforms, frequency-domain sinusoidal components, physical models and resonance models. OpenSoundEdit is a sound editing system that provides a three-dimensional user interface to visualize and edit complex sounds composed from these different sound representations. Center for New Music and Audio Technology, Berkeley."
(Stanford Univ., NSF) The virtual creatures project is a (NSF funded) project for viewing creatures using computerized, high resolution, digital representations. The plan is to create a library of virtual creatures designed for teaching. Students will be able to explore, visualize, touch, and change these creatures in ways that are impossible with real laboratory animals. Students will be able to learn about biology, physics mathematics, biomechanics, and biochemistry in a rich multidisciplinary learning environment.
Developing a Personal Computer-Based Data Visualization System Using Public Domain Software
(P. C. Chen ) "[...] Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is available on UNIX and PC platforms. [...]. It has abundant programming classes/objects that are contained in the system library. Users can also develop their own classes/objects in addition to those existing in the class library. Users can develop applications with any of the C++, Tcl/Tk, and JAVA environments. The present research will show how a data visualization system can be developed with VTK running on a personal computer. The topics will include: execution efficiency; visual object quality; availability of the user interface design; and exploring the feasibility of the VTK-based World Wide Web data visualization system. The present research will feature a case study showing how to use VTK to visualize meteorological data with techniques including, iso-surface, volume rendering, vector display, and composite analysis. [...]"
"demviewer is a 3d terrain viewing program. It is built on the VTK toolkit for elevation data processing and 3D rendering with the user interface capabilities of ivtools. The VTK renderer in demviewer writes to the X window id of a Unidraw viewer.
Visualization Of Current Fields In A Single Blade Pump - CS6393 Scientific Visualization
(F. Reise) "The goal of this project is to use various visualization techniques to help to analyze current fields in a single blade pump. Various techniques will be applied and analyzed. Comments about the power and ease of use of the visualization toolkit will be made. Problems that occur while obtaining the data and cause difficulties in the evaluation are also shown."
Multi-Scale Free-Form Surface Description and Curvature Estimation
(Dr N. Khalili, P. Yuen, Dept. of Electronic and Electrical Eng., Univ. of Surrey) "Complete triangulated models of 3-D objects were constructed through automatic fusion of range images and used in our experiments. Diffusion of the surface is acheived through convolutions of local parametrizations of the surface with a 2-D Gaussian filter. Our method for local parametrization makes use of semigeodesic or goedesic polar coordinates as a natural and efficient way of sampling the local surface shape. The smoothing eliminates surface noise and small surface detail gradually. This process is repeated at each point of the surface and the new point positions after filtering define the smoothed surface. To achieve multi-scale description of a 3-D surface, the surface is then smoothed iteratively. This process is equivalent to heat diffusion of the surface. The theory described above has been adapted to a 3-D triangulated mesh."
(J. A. Richolt, M. Teschner, P. Everett, B. Girod,M. B. Millis, R. Kikinis) "Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis (SCFE) is a disease affecting the geometry of adolescent hips. Evaluation of the slippage as well planning of correction surgeries is a major three-dimensional problem. Therefore, the current clinical approach, which is based on biplanar plain radiographs, is not satisfying. We have developed a software environment for planning and evaluation of reorienting osteotomies in severe cases of SCFE. In our system CT-based virtual surface models fitted by oriented bounding boxes (OBB) are manipulated. The hip motion as well as a correction surgery can be simulated. [...]."
15 Apr. 1999 :
NCSA Cave Visualization (also mentioned in Classes: CAVE )
(P. Rajlich, NCSA) The Visualization and Virtual Environments at NCSA use VTK in their Cave system for viewing isosurfaces and astronomical datasets. The Cave is a fully immersive room with head tracking and 3D manipulation. VTK is also used in a variety of other application such as resource/pollution visualization in the Chesapeake Bay, and tele-immersive visualization and collaboration
Geocap offers a rapid application development tool for geoscience research and development. The building blocks (data) and their logical interaction are available through 2D and 3D visualizations via a high-level scripting language. "Here are a few examples of volumes, data types and graphics generated by Geocap."
7 May 1999 :
(C. Klesper , FU-Berlin) "EDV-based interactive visualization methods are becoming a very essential part in the creating and analyzing three-dimensional models in geoscience. Especially in the case of interactive 3D-visualization and validation of geometric models, the existing modeling systems can meet the user requirements only inadequate. This lack of functionality is often compensated by the user with a patchwork of of different small programs and applications. The task of this work was to find a program or a graphic library to adapt the capability of interactive 3D-visualization in an easy to use environment and to add it to the existing gravity and magnetic modeling system IGMAS." (example code available)
21 Sep. 1999 :
Visualizing Human Cortical Surface Models Created from Medical Images using VTK
(D. Yu, Image Analysis and Communications Lab, J. Hopkins Univ.) "Part of our lab's work involves creating accurate human cortical surface models from medical images. In order to visually validate the accuracy of our models, we have begun to explore methods to interactively visualize the complex 3-D surface models of the brain together with the images from which they were created."
4 Apr. 2001 :
(V. Heuveline and H. Schmitt) "HiVision is a visualisation platform including advanced visualisation techniques for the analysis and exploration of data supplied by numerical simulation. Although primarily developed for visualisation in the area of computational fluid dynamics as part of the HiFlow project, the HiVision framework is discipline independent and may be advantageously used in various areas such as structural mechanics and reactive flow simulation."
22 May. 2001 :
(P. Ramachandran) "MayaVi is a free, cross platform, easy to use scientific data visualizer. It provides a GUI to ease the visualization process, is written in Python and uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) for the graphics."
