The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

system for

3D computer graphics 3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...

image processing An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

and

scientific visualization Scientific visualization ( also spelled scientific visualisation) is an interdisciplinary branch of science concerned with the visualization of scientific phenomena.Michael Friendly (2008)"Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, stat ...

.''Visualization Handbook'', Academic Press, 2005,
Chapter 30: the Visualization Toolkit
/ref> VTK is distributed under the

OSI OSI may refer to: Places * Osijek Airport (IATA code: OSI), an airport in Croatia * Ősi, a village in Veszprém county, Hungary * Oši, an archaeological site in Semigallia, Latvia * Osi, a village in Ido-Osi, Ekiti State, Nigeria * Osi, Ekiti ...

-approved

BSD 3-clause License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

Functionality

VTK consists of a

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

class library and several interpreted interface layers including

Tcl/Tk Tk is a free and open-source, cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements of GUI widgets for building a graphical user interface (GUI) in many programming languages. Tk provides a number of widgets commonly needed to ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, and

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

. The toolkit is created and supported by the

Kitware __NOTOC__ Kitware, Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Clifton Park, New York. The company is involved in the research and development of open-source software in the fields of computer vision, medical imaging, visualization, 3D data publ ...

team. VTK supports a various visualization algorithms including:

scalar Scalar may refer to: *Scalar (mathematics), an element of a field, which is used to define a vector space, usually the field of real numbers * Scalar (physics), a physical quantity that can be described by a single element of a number field such ...

vector Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

tensor In mathematics, a tensor is an algebraic object that describes a multilinear relationship between sets of algebraic objects related to a vector space. Tensors may map between different objects such as vectors, scalars, and even other tenso ...

, texture, and volumetric methods; and advanced modeling techniques such as: implicit modeling, polygon reduction, mesh smoothing, cutting, contouring, and

Delaunay triangulation In mathematics and computational geometry, a Delaunay triangulation (also known as a Delone triangulation) for a given set P of discrete points in a general position is a triangulation DT(P) such that no point in P is inside the circumcircle o ...

. VTK has an

information visualization Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...

framework, has a suite of 3D interaction widgets, supports parallel processing, and integrates with various databases and GUI toolkits such as Qt and Tk. VTK is cross-platform and runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and Unix platforms. The core of VTK is implemented as a C++ toolkit, requiring users to build applications by combining various objects into an application. The system also supports automated wrapping of the C++ core into Python, Java and Tcl, so that VTK applications may also be written using these programming languages.

History

VTK was initially created in 1993 as companion software to the book ''The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics''. The book and software were written by three researchers (Will Schroeder, Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) on their own time and with permission from General Electric (thus the ownership of the software resided with, and continues to reside with, the authors). After the core of VTK was written, users and developers around the world began to improve and apply the system to real-world problems. With the founding of

, the VTK community grew rapidly, and toolkit usage expanded into academic, research and commercial applications. A number of major companies and organizations, such as

Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force Ba ...

Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

funded the development of VTK and even developed a number of VTK modules themselves. VTK forms the core of the

3DSlicer 3D Slicer (Slicer) is a free and open source software package for image analysis and scientific visualization. Slicer is used in a variety of medical applications, including autism, multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus erythematosus, prost ...

biomedical computing application, and numerous research papers at IEEE Visualization and other conferences based on VTK have appeared. VTK has been used on a large 1024-processor computer at the

to process nearly a

Petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

of data. Later VTK was expanded to support the ingestion, processing and display of

informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems, especially those for data storage and retrieval. According to ACM ''Europe and'' ''Informatics Europe'', informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which ...

data. This work was supported by

under the 'Titan' project.

Criticism

In 2013, a survey paper on visualization for

radiotherapy Radiation therapy or radiotherapy, often abbreviated RT, RTx, or XRT, is a therapy using ionizing radiation, generally provided as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells and normally delivered by a linear accelerator. Radia ...

noticed that while VTK is a powerful and widely known toolkit, it lacked a number of important features, such as multivolume rendering, had no support of

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

libraries such as

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...

, no support of out-of-core rendering of huge datasets and no native support for visualization of time-dependent volumetric data. However, since 2013 there have been improvements such as VTK-m which can speed-up and parallelize certain computationally intensive tasks using accelerators such as

. VTK is also used in the visualization pipeline of radiological imaging software such as MEDInria or Starviewer which perform multi-volume (also called fusion) and time-dependent (also called phase) visualizations.

References

External links

Kitware home page

Visualization toolkit (VTK)
and officia
VTK Wiki

Parallel Visualization Application (ParaView)
and officia
ParaView Wiki

PDF 9-page technical paper
(with color images)

vtk.js, a Javascript implementation of VTKSome of the early history of VTK
{{Visualization Computer vision software Free 3D graphics software Free science software Free software programmed in C++ Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Free software programmed in Python Free software programmed in Tcl Software that uses Qt Software that uses Tk (software) Software using the BSD license Free data visualization software

Functionality

History

Criticism

See also

References

Further reading

External links