VTK

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

VTK

Developer:	Kitware Inc.
Latest release:	5.0.2
OS:	Cross-platform
Available language(s):	C++, Tcl, Python, Java
Use:	Scientific visualization
License:	BSD-like
Website:	www.vtk.org

Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization used by thousands of researchers and developers around the world. VTK consists of a C++ class library, and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. Professional support and products for VTK are provided by Kitware, Inc. VTK supports a wide variety of visualization algorithms including scalar, vector, tensor, texture, and volumetric methods; and advanced modeling techniques such as implicit modeling, polygon reduction, mesh smoothing, cutting, contouring, and Delaunay triangulation. In addition, dozens of imaging algorithms have been directly integrated to allow the user to mix 2D imaging / 3D graphics algorithms and data.

VTK is a powerful platform independent graphics engine with parallel rendering support. "Not a super-fast graphics engine and not a toy". For example, VTK has been used on a large 1024-processor computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to process nearly a Petabyte of data. In 2005 was used to real-time rendering of a ZSU23-4 Russian Anti-Aircraft vehicle being hit by a planar wave, with 2.5 billion cell calculation, in the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

It has an open-source copyright modelled after the BSD license.

1 History
2 References
- 2.1 Books
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK, http://www.vtk.org) is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization used by thousands of researchers and developers around the world. VTK consists of a C++ class library, and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. Professional support and products for VTK are provided by Kitware, Inc. VTK supports a wide variety of visualization algorithms including scalar, vector, tensor, texture, and volumetric methods; and advanced modeling techniques such as implicit modeling, polygon reduction, mesh smoothing, cutting, contouring, and Delaunay triangulation. In addition, dozens of imaging algorithms have been directly integrated to allow the user to mix 2D imaging / 3D graphics algorithms and data.

VTK was initially created in 1993 as companion software to the book "The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" published by Prentice-Hall. The book and software were written by three researchers from GE Corporate R&D (Will Schroeder, Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) on their own time and with permission from GE (thus the ownership of the software resided with, and continues to reside with, the authors). Once the book was published and the software released with a BSD-style open source license, a world-wide community of users and developers quickly formed. In addition, GE and other organizations began to support of the software. In 1998, Will Schroeder and Ken Martin left GE to form Kitware, Inc.

With the founding of Kitware, the VTK community grew rapidly, and toolkit usage expanded into academic, research and commercial applications. For example, VTK forms the core of the Slicer (http://slicer.org) biomedical computing application, and numerous research papers at IEEE Visualization and other conferences based on VTK have appeared. VTK also forms the basis of several collaborations between Kitware and national organizations such as Sandia, Los Alamos, and Livermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for their large data visualization needs. VTK is also one of the key computing tools for the recently established National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, NA-MIC (http://www.na-mic.org), part of NIH's roadmap initiative for future computing tools.