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 .
Now you can get the vispack source using CVS. On linux or Cygwin, you can check out the vispack as follows:
First, set an environment variable:
setenv CVS_RSH ssh
Then
cvs -d :ext:your-cs-login@shell.cs.utah.edu:/uusoc/res/image/CVS checkout
vispack
To update your local vispack
1. cd vispack
2. cvs update -d
or cvs -d :ext:your-cs-login@famine.cs.utah.edu:/uusoc/res/image/CVS update
The systen then will ask for your password for your CS account.
Since we need to update Vispack from time to time,
you are strongly recommended to check out vispack from CVS, which will save you time to
get the latest version of Vispack.
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 make a 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.
Acknowledgements
The development of Vispack was supported by
the Office of Naval Research under grant
#N00014-01-10033 and the National Science Foundation under grant
#CCR0092065.