[Insight-developers] Container of heterogeneous images

[David Doria]

I would like to store several images of different types in a vector.
Something like this:

#include "itkImage.h"

template <typename TImage>
void MyFunction(TImage* image) // A function that needs access to the
itk::Image interface
{
  itk::Index<2> index;
  index.Fill(0);
  cout << image->GetPixel(index);
}

int main(int, char *[])
{
  std::vector<itk::ImageBase<2>*> images;

  itk::ImageBase<2>* image1 = itk::Image<float, 2>::New();
  images.push_back(image1);

  itk::ImageBase<2>* image2 = itk::Image<int,2>::New();
  images.push_back(image2);

  MyFunction(images[0]); // no member named GetPixel

  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Of course the above doesn't work because MyFunction gets instantated
with TImage = itk::ImageBase<2>, so none of the itk::Image functions
are available through that pointer. One solution is to  modify
itk::ImageBase to have pure virtual functions declarations and then
subclass itk::Image to implement them. The result would be this:

itk::ImageBase<2>* image1 = itk::Image<float, 2>::New().GetPointer();
image1->MyNewFunction();

However, this would be extremely annoying for users, as then the code
would rely on a custom ITK version.

Is there an easier way to do this?

Thanks,

David