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.