[Insight-developers] Re: Suggestion: Tensors and Tensor ImageFilters

[Joshua Cates]

Hi Jim, et al.

> Another consideration with respect to memory management:
> 
> I am concerned with the amount of memory needed to represent an 
> volume of tensors.  I imagine that in an image of tensors, not all the 
> tensors are of interest (i.e. pixels outside the anatomy or region of
> interest). If this is the case, we should design the tensor pixel class
> to take minimal storage if we do not intend to access the pixel.  In an 
> ITK image, the pixels in a filter's output image may allocated by the
> pipeline.  We may want this allocation of the pixels to take minimal
> storage.  For instance, a tensor pixel could be a stack based object
> but hold a pointer to vector or matrix that is used for its storage class.
> When the pixel is needed, the memory for the vector or matrix will then
> be allocated.  

We implemented a "sparse image" strategy like this for Tolga's 4th order
surface processing code that may be useful here.  Basically the idea is to
keep an itk::Image of pointers that can be assigned to dynamically
allocated objects.

See itkSparseImage itkObjectStore.


Josh.