Saturday, May 20, 2006

Installing ITK at home

I have been trying to get ITK (Imperial college's ITK NOT Insight Toolkit) running at my home using Visual .NET 2003. Apparently ITK has problems compiling in .NET 2005. The errors which show up are correctable and it becomes evident that .NET 2005 has improved their cl compiler. There are some errors that has to do with assigning a const char* to a char* to which .NET 2003 doesnt complain which it should have.

Getting down to important things to remember when installing ITK, one has to make sure that VTK and FLTK is compiled using the same compiler or else it might throw some errors. FLTK also needs to be compiled with the FLTK_USE_ZLIB, FLTK_USE_JPEG, FLTK_USE_PNG options set to off. This is assuming that our system does not have ZLIB, PNG, JPEG libraries and we make FLTK build the libraries for us.

It is also important to compile ITK under Release mode. There are different compile modes in Visual .NET 2003 (i.e. Debug, Release, etc). The IDE usually defaults itself to the Debug mode. Setting .NET 2003 compiler to the Release mode makes the compilation process a lot quicker. Technically we should be able to compile it in Debug mode, but I havent tested it.

If you are going to be using VTK volume rendering libraries, strangely the vtkVolumeRendering library (vtkVolumeRendering.lib file in the vtkVolumeRendering folder) is not loaded as an additional library by default to the visual .net 2003 linker. One can easily manually do this, by going to Project properties -> Linker -> Input.

One last word: watch out for the errors, ignore the warnings. Some of these errors can actually be fixed if looked into more closely.


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