The VTK Journal logo

The VTK Journal

Home

Visual Programming of VTK Pipelines in Simulink

Gobbi, David G., Mousavi, Parvin, Campigotto, Adam, Dickinson, Andrew W. L., Abolmaesumi, Parvin
University of Calgary
Publication cover image

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10380/3226
New: Prefer using the following doi: https://doi.org/10.54294/4vuezh
Published in The VTK Journal - 2010 January - December Submissions.
Submitted by David Gobbi on 2010-11-01 01:14:32.

We have created a wrapper package named SimVTK that allows VTK, and third-party classes derived from VTK classes, to be seamlessly integrated with MATLAB's Simulink interface. Our package generates a loadable Simulink module for each VTK class, which is then represented as a "block" on the Simulink canvas, and can be connected with other blocks to form a pipeline. Each block can be double-clicked to bring up a dialog box that allows introspection and control of the VTK class. After a VTK pipeline has been built, it can be run interactively from within Simulink. The outputs of the pipeline can be displayed in an interactive render window, written to a disk file, or exported to a MATLAB variable. Within Simulink, the VTK pipeline can also be connected to the ITK pipeline through the use of our SimITK package. We generate the VTK-Simulink wrapper automatically though the use of CMake build scripts, with XML as an intermediate representation of the VTK class interfaces.