The Vispack Library

Introduction

Vispack is a C++ library developed for processing volumes images and surfaces. We will use it as the foundation for the projects in this course. Vispack relies on standard C++ features such as templates, inheritance, and the standard template library (STD). In the very least Vispack provides image readers and writers and a data structure for accessing image data. It also provides a number of image processing methods. Vispack does not provide any GUI interface to its functionality---it is strictly data structures, algorithms, and image IO.

Vispack Source

As with many open source packages, it has documentation, but it is not complete. You will learn vispack by reading the documentation, and by reading the source code. The vispack source code comes as a compressed tar file, which is available here .

CMake

Vispack has been compiled and tested on several different architectures including Mac OSX, SGI-IRIX, Linux, and Cygwin. It makes use of a build tool called CMake, which you will need to install. You can download CMake here .

Some Instructions

You should build vispack in a separate directory from the source. In this way we can update the source throughout the course as necessary. This is easy with Cmake. You simply create a sister directory to vispack, such as vispack-build. Change directories to vispack-build and then type "cmake ../vispack". You can configure cmake variables with "ccmake". You should build your project within the vispack tree. To keep things clean you can make soft link from vispack/apps/myapps to the directory where you will put your application directories. A CMakeList.txt file in that directory will indicate to Cmake that it should make your application subdirectories. By using this soft link we can later replace vispack without disturbing your applications. If you copy the CMakeList.txt file from the apps/imagetest directory, that will get you started.

Step By Step Instructions for Linux Build in the CADE Lab

1) Make a working directory: mkdir cs6640
2) cd cs6640
3) Make a build directory for vispack: mkdir vispack-build
4) Download the vispack tar file and extract it with: tar -xzvf vispack.tgz
5) Download the vispack tar file and extract it with: tar -xzvf vispack.tgz
6) Get and install Cmake. The easiest way to install cmake is to download a self-extracting package from here . Download this file to your cs6640 directory and type: sh ./cmake-2.6.2-Linux-i386.sh Follow the instruction and install the cmake where you want or by default.
7) By default, cmake will be installed at ./cmake-2.6.2-Linux-i386. Then make sure to change your $PATH. (assume you use bash)export PATH = ~/cs6640/cmake-2.6.2-Linux-i386/bin:$PATH
8) Configure cmake. Go to the vispack-build directory, and type: cmake ../vispack
9) Build vispack. In the vispack-build directory type: make
10) Try the program "imagetest" in the apps/imagetest directory. It take one argument, which is a tiff, jpg, or fts image.