VTK

Infobox Software
name = VTK



caption =
author =
developer = Kitware Inc..
released =
latest release version = 5.2
latest release date =
operating_system = Cross-platform
genre = Scientific visualization
license = 3-Clause BSD
source model = Open Source
language = C++, Tcl, Python, Java
website = [http://www.vtk.org/ www.vtk.org] The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open source graphics toolkit. It is a platform independent graphics engine with parallel rendering support. VTK has an active development community that includes laboratories, institutions and universities from around the world. VTK has several large collaborations betweenKitware and national organizations such as Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos, andLivermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for theirlarge data visualization research efforts.

VTK is an open-source toolkit licensed under the BSD license.

History

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 bythree researchers from [http://www.crd.ge.com GE Corporate R&D] (Will Schroeder, Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) on their own time and withpermission from GE (thus the ownership of the software resided with,and continues to reside with, the authors). Once the book waspublished and the software released with a BSD-style open sourcelicense, a world-wide community of users and developers quicklyformed. In addition, GE and other organizations began to support ofthe software. In 1998, Will Schroeder and Ken Martin left GE to form Kitware Inc..

With the founding of Kitware, the VTK community grew rapidly, andtoolkit usage expanded into academic, research and commercialapplications. For example, VTK forms the core of the 3DSlicer biomedical computing application, and numerous researchpapers at IEEE Visualization and other conferences based on VTK haveappeared. 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, ParaView (based on VTK) was used to real-time rendering of a ZSU-23-4 Russian Anti-Aircraft vehicle being hit by a planar wave, with 2.5 billion cell calculation, in the United States Army Research Laboratory. VTK also forms the basis of several collaborations betweenKitware and national organizations such as Sandia, Los Alamos, andLivermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for theirlarge data visualization needs. VTK is also one of the key computingtools for the recently established National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, NA-MIC (http://www.na-mic.org), part of NIH's roadmap initiative forfuture computing tools.

Recently work on VTK includes a significant expansion of the toolkit to support the ingestion, processing and display of informatics data.Fact|date=April 2008 That work is supported by Sandia National Laboratories under the 'Titan' project and represents one of the first concentrated efforts to unify scientific visualization with informatics functionality.

References

Books

*The Visualization Toolkit, Third Edition (Paperback) by Will Schroeder, Ken Martin, Bill Lorensen (August 2004).

See also

*Scientific visualization
*ITK
*SIGGRAPH
*CFX
*VisTrails

External links

Kitware

* [http://www.kitware.com Kitware]
* [http://www.itk.org Insight Segmentation and Registration toolkit (ITK)] and official [http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK ITK Wiki]
* [http://www.vtk.org Visualization toolkit (VTK)] and official [http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK VTK Wiki]
* [http://www.paraview.org Parallel Visualization Application (ParaView)] and official [http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView ParaView Wiki]

Government

* [http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki The National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NAMIC)]
* [http://www.sandia.gov Sandia National Laboratory]
* [http://www.lanl.gov Los Alamos National Laboratory]
* [http://www.arl.army.mil U.S. Army Research Laboratory]

oftware

* [http://www.amiravis.com Amira]
* [http://www.slicer.org Slicer]
* [http://www.paraview.org ParaView]
* [http://visit.llnl.gov/ VisIt]
* [http://www.vcreatelogic.com/oss/vtkdesigner VTK Designer 2]
* [http://www.vistrails.org VisTrails]
* [http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/ Mayavi]

Others

* [http://www.siggraph.org ACM SIGGRAPH] and official [http://wiki.siggraph.org/wiki/Main_Page ACM SIGGRAPH Wiki]
* [http://freshmeat.net/projects/vtk/ vtk] on freshmeat
* [http://marchingcubes.org/index.php/VTK Some of the early history of VTK]
* [http://www.osc.edu/supercomputing/training/vtk/vtk_0505.pdf A good starter ppt]