[vtkusers] tiling and paging large images

[Philip Winston]

We have an existing VTK application which operates on a single
moderate sized image.  We want to extend it to support arbitrarily
large images.  We figure the the image needs to be broken into tiles,
and only the needed tiles are loaded into memory.  As you pan around
the image, tiles are load off disk, kind of like google maps.

Has anyone done something like this with VTK? We have an existing
pipeline with some color mapping and blending, so it's not a simple
static image.  We were thinking of just making an N x N array of the
same pipeline, having a bunch of vtkImageActors in the scene, and
creating/destroying/moving them as needed.  At first I thought of
maybe extending vtkOpenGLImageActor to manage the tiling under the
hood, but then I realized the other steps in the pipeline would need
to be tile aware also.  Any other ideas?  Thanks.

-Philip