ITK Release 4/Image Class Hierarchy Refactoring

Motivation

The goal of this proposal is to add support for additional image types in ITK.

ITK currently supports several kinds of image types:

• Image
• VectorImage
• SpecialCoordinatesImage
  • PhasedArray3DSpecialCoordinatesImage
• BloxImage
• SparseImage

With the exception of the PhasedArray3DSpecialCoordinatesImage, all the image types assume that voxels have regular spacing in each dimension. While this assumption covers many cases in biomedical imaging, it restricts ITK's use for certain types of microscopy and remote sensing images, for example.