VTK
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2008-06-24T21:48:25Z
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{{Infobox Software
| name = VTK
| logo = [[Image:VTKlogo.png|100px]]
| screenshot =
| caption =
| author =
| developer = [[Kitware|Kitware Inc.]].
| released =
| latest release version = 5.0.4
| latest release date =
| operating_system = [[Cross-platform]]
| genre = [[Scientific visualization]]
| license = [[BSD licenses|3-Clause BSD]]
| source model = [[Open Source]]
| language = [[C++]], [[Tcl]], [[Python (programming language)|Python]], [[Java (programming language)|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 between
Kitware and national organizations such as Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos, and
Livermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for their
large data visualization research efforts.
VTK is an open-source toolkit licensed under the [[BSD licenses|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 by
three researchers from [http://www.crd.ge.com 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|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 [[3DSlicer]] 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 [[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 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.
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 ==
{{portal|Free software|Free Software Portal Logo.svg}}
*[[Scientific visualization]]
*[[Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit|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]
===Software===
*[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]
===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]
[[Category:Computer vision software]]
[[Category:Free 3D graphics software]]
[[Category:Free science software]]
[[Category:Open source health care resources]]
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