The following documentation resources are available at the current time:

  • The ITK Software Guide. This extensive reference PDF document (over 780 pages) describes in detail many of the features of the toolkit. It contains information for both users and developers. If you are serious about ITK you will want this document. (Note: a printed book including a CD-ROM with source, documentation, data and binaries is available from Kitware's e-store. The CD also includes a fully-hyperlinked version of the text.)

  • The ITK theory book Insight Into Images Principles and Practice for Segmentation, Registration and Image Analysis is available from A. K. Peters. Please see the following flyer for more information.

  • Doxygen generated documentation for the latest ITK Release: ITK 3.18 Documentation. These pages contain extensive descriptions describing inheritance, methods, object collaboration, and so on for the ITK version 3.16 release. Click here for Legacy Documentation.

  • Tutorial Material. Presentations used for tutorials presented in conferences such as IEEE Visualization 2002 and 2003, MICCAI 2003 and SPIE Medical Imaging 2003 and 2004.

  • The book Mastering CMake, ISBN 1-930934-09-2, by Ken Martin and Bill Hoffman and published by Kitware. This book describes in detail how to use CMake. It is not specific to the ITK project, but can help you with general CMake questions and help you use ITK more effectively in your own work.

  • The numerics package VNL used by ITK is part of the VXL computer vision toolkit. Documentation for VNL can be found as part of the VXL book.

  • Medical Image Registration, by Joseph Hajnal (Editor), D. J. Hawkes (Editor), Derek Hill (Editor). The Biomedical Engineering Series. This book provides a detailed description of techniques used for medical image registration. This book is unrelated to the Insight Toolkit, but is suggested here as an excellent introduction to medical image registration.

  • The CVS Book, Open Source Development with CVS,, by Karl Fogel and Moshe Bar This book describes in detail how to use CVS. It is unrelated to the ITK project, but can help you dealing with the intricacies of getting ITK code through the CVS repository.

  • Access to the CVS InsightDocuments repository. This work is in progress, and contains detailed documents about algorithms, style, build environment, and so on. (Please see the Download instructions for CVS for more information.)

  • ITK Applications Pages are another important documentation reference based on ITK's extensive testing suite. The applications can be found in the Insight/Testing/Code directory (and related subdirectories).

  • Known Compiler Issues describes a set of known problems found with particular compilers when trying to build ITK. Many of those issues forced developers to reshape the toolkit in order to make it work with buggy compilers or with compilers that do not implement all the features defined in the C++ standard.

  • The Insight Toolkit Community WIKI page is an open space for exchanging information and experiences about ITK. Thanks to Gavin Baker for creating this resource.

  • The Kitware Source is a quarterly newsletter for developers designed to deliver detailed technical articles, information on recent releases and upcoming changes related to Kitware's open source products. This includes information on ITK. Click here for a compendium of ITK related articles that have appeared in the Source. Source subscriptions are free. To be added to our mailing list, please contact the editor at editor@kitware.com, be sure to include your full name and postal mailing address in the email.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Resources

A number of resources are available to learn more about ITK:

  • The ITK web pages are located http://www.itk.org.
  • Users and developers alike should read the ITK Software Guide.
  • The software can be downloaded from http://www.itk.org/HTML/Download.htm.
  • Developers, or users interested in contributing code, should look in the document Insight/Documentation/InsightDeveloperStart.pdf or InsightDeveloperStart.doc found in the source code distribution.
  • Developers should also look at the ITK style guide Insight/Documentation/Style.pdf found in the source distribution.

Applications

A great way to learn about ITK is to see how it's used. There are four places to find ITK applications:
  1. The Insight/Examples/ source code examples distributed with ITK. The source code is available. In addition, it is heavily commented and works in combination with the ITK Software Guide.
  2. The separate InsightApplications checkout.
  3. The Applications web pages. These are extensive descriptions, with images and references, of the examples found in #1 above.
  4. The testing directories distributed with ITK are simple, mainly undocumented examples of how to use the code.

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