Home < Documentation < Labs < OpenGLFilters

Overview

Here we summarize some efforts for enabling image processing (filtering/smoothing) in VTK/Slicer using OpenGL.

The reason behind this page is trying to coordinate the various projects regarding this subject.

Meetings

Attended by: Davide Punzo, Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin, Ken Martin, Utkarsh Ayachit and Robert Maynard

Based on an original idea of Steve Pieper

In order to implement efficient filtering, OpenGL solution seems the best that fits our needs:

no requirement on external library (CUDA or OpenCL).
performance boosting is fairly good to allow almost interactive filtering up to volume of ~10^8 voxels.

Based on the Steve Pieper implementation of the classes:

vtkOpenGLTextureImage
vtkOpenGLShaderComputation

here an Use case:

https://github.com/Punzo/SlicerAstro/tree/master/AstroSmoothing/Logic
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03782

For a full integration of the openGLfilters pipeline in VTK, it will be ideal to have a general purpose class:

VTKOpenGLImageAlgorithm

this class will have the duty to:

handle the I/O communication between the vtkImageData and the GPU Texture using fully the VTK shader infrastructure, since the shader infrastructure is already available in VTK (safe binding, automatic versioning, etc... http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/Shader_In_VTK).
child classes will handle different approach (e.g. multipass/iterative filtering).

Ken Martin provided this structure in VTK: [1]

Talk with Steve and getting his feedback.
Ken will be very happy to contribute a base class vtkOpenGLImageAlgorithm
- Timeline: in 2-3 weeks after his vacation
- Most likely derived from vtkImageAlgorithm, the class will integrate feature from VTK/Rendering/OpenGL/vtkGaussianBlurPass.h to facilitate the use of custom shaders to implement GPU based filters.