ITK 2.6 Released

ITK 2.6 was released on March 1, 2006. ITK has adopted a Quarterly release model in order to more rapidly deliver new features to the community. This release schedule began with the ITK 2.4 release. Highlights of the 2.6 release include:

• For the first time the Open Access Insight Journal was used as the official mechanism for new classes and algorithms. See the ITK Wiki (http://www.itk.org/Wiki) for a description of this new procedure.
• Four contributions from papers submitted and reviewed in the Insight Journal were added to the toolkit.

These contributions are as follows:
• The Invert Intensity Image Filter is a filter based on a Functor that inverts the intensities in one image. Although this filter is relatively simple, it is significant because it was contributed with a clean coding style by a user that has not participated before as a developer.
• The Modulus Image Filter is also a filter based on a Functor and computes modulus on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
• The Morphological Gradient, also called Beucher gradient, is the difference between the dilation and erosion of an image.
• Threshold Maximum Connected Components is a filter that computes the threshold value that will result in a maximum number of connected components with a size larger than a limit specified by the user. This filter was demonstrated to be useful for cellular images in microscopy.
• Support for Bayesian Classification was improved.
• The JPEG libraries were updated to JPEG 2000 and the DICOM reader (GDCM) was updated in order to use this new version of JPEG.