[Insight-users] ITK - VTK connection -- VTKImageExport+vtkImageImport vs. vtkItk vs. Auxiliary/vtk ?

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Sam,

As you pointed out, there are multiple ways of combining ITK and VTK.

It all depends on what your goal is.

The method in vtkItk is appropriate for applications that are mostly
VTK-based, and want to introduce some ITK functionality by making ITK
filters look like additional VTK classes. It basically wraps ITK into
a VTK-looking set of classes.

The method in the tutorial is appropriate for applications that have
a balanced presence of ITK and VTK, and simply need to connect their
two pipelines.

Applications such as SNAP and Slicer make particular choices too.

You will also find options in the IGSTK toolkit (www.igstk.org)

and in the recent paper that Andinet Enquobahrie posted to the Insight
Journal:

"Seamless VTK-ITK pipeline connection for image data handling"
http://hdl.handle.net/1926/495


In general I will recomend to use described in the paper above.
(or even more, use the classes that were posted along with the
paper, since they include ImageIO too).



   Regards,


      Luis



======================
Sam Preston wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm new to ITK and VTK, and am working on a small application to apply
> some ITK filters and display the results using VTK.
> 
> Looking at the 'getting started with ITK and VTK' guides, I've found
> two methods for combining ITK and VTK in the InsightApplications
> package, the vtkItk project and the Auxiliary/vtk project.  I've also
> been looking at the code for the SNAP application, though, and it uses
> the itk class VTKImageExport and the vtk class vtkImageImport.
> 
> The last method seems the best, since it doesn't rely on anything but
> the core ITK and VTK packages, but is there a reason to choose one
> method over the others?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Sam
>