[Insight-developers] Bio-Formats integration with VTK/ITK

[Karthik Krishnan]

Curtis Rueden wrote:
> My goal with this email is to kickstart some discussion about 
> integrating Bio-Formats with VTK/ITK. Specifically, my questions for 
> the community are:
>
> 1) Do others agree that this form of integration is a good idea? Or is 
> there a better way to accomplish the bulleted goals above?
We welcome your efforts in this area. Perhaps adding a wikipage to the 
ITK wiki would be a good place to gather these discussions.
>
> 2) I don't know much about ITK or VTK yet. Where is the right 
> integration point? Within ITK, accessible using 
> ImageIOBase/ImageIOFactory? Or elsewhere? Does VTK/ITK have an 
> appropriate plugin infrastructure?
Yes, the object factories in ITK provide this functionality. Basically, 
you can load, dynamically, factories for the BioImageXD file formats. An 
environment variable ITK_AUTOLOAD_PATH is used to specify the directory 
where you could wrap the BioFormats package as a shared lib (dll/so).

More information can be found at :
  http://www.itk.org/Wiki/Plugin_IO_mechanisms
> 4) Any thoughts on the GPL/BSD licensing issue?
As a paradigm, one of the libraries used in the "na-mic kit", and 
shipped with Slicer3 is Teem. Slicer3 is distributed under a BSD 
license. Teem is distributed under a LGPL license, modified to 
accomodate static linking exceptions. This wold allow one to ship 
BioFormats binaries without hassles.  It simplifies our build process, 
and allows complete usage, and IMHO, for the ITK/VTK community might be 
preferable than having to deal with plugins etc.

FLTK also does a similar thing.


--
karthik