ITK 4.8.0 has been released!

On behalf of the Insight Toolkit community, we are proud to announce that ITK 4.8.0 has been released!

Get it Now!

The 4.8 release offers substantial benefits to the medical and scientific imaging community by making the toolkit more accessible to non-C++ programmers and by providing greater availability on mobile, high-performance computing (HPC), and web-browser platforms.  A few selected highlights for this release are:

• New remote modules: BridgeNumPy, LabelErodeDilate, ParabolicMorphology, MinimalPathExtraction

• itk::FFTPadImageFilter to automatically pad images for the FFT implementation’s supported greatest prime factor

• Additional point set registration capabilities.

• More modules can be built as shared libraries.

• GDCM, MetaIO, KWSys,and MINC have been updated to their latest upstream versions.

• Python wrapping is in excellent shape and works with the latest GCC, Clang, and MSVC.

• Experimental cross-compilation support for Windows (MinGW-w64), ARMv6 (Raspberry Pi), ARMv7 (Android), ppc64le (POWER8), and JavaScript (Emscripten).

This release is a major milestone that marks the hard work of many outstanding community members. Congratulations and well done to the 31 contributors to this release. We would especially like to recognize the new contributors, David Froger, Cyril Mory, Dzenan Zukic, Ivan Setiawan, Jan Bergmeier, Rolf Eike Beer, Davis Vigneault, Gary Jia, and Alexander Hewer.

Testing data is available separately from the release archives starting with this release. Unpack the “InsightData” archive in the same directory that the “InsightToolkit” archive was unpacked to make the archive testing data available to a build.  When archive testing data is not present, the BUILD_TESTING CMake configuration option will be off by default. Turn on BUILD_TESTING without the testing data archive to fetch the data via the network automatically.

This release introduces CastXML, a C-family abstract syntax tree XML output tool based on Clang. This is a more maintainable replacement for GCC-XML that works with the latest Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC), Clang, and GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compilers. CastXML generates XML output that is backwards-compatible with GCC-XML output, which is parsed by pygccxml in the wrapping process.

New Features

* Wrapping improvements

• Wrapping now uses CastXML instead of GCCXML

• The latest GCC, Clang, and MSVC are fully supported

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/888

• Cross-compilation and packaging support

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/904

• ITK_WRAP_VECTOR_COMPONENTS option to specify number of wrapped vector components

• More classes wrapped

* Compiler Support

• GCC 5.1

• Clang 3.6.0

• Better cross-compilation support (requires CMake 3.3)

• Experimental support for Emscripten (JavaScript)

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/912

• Experimental support for the Raspberry Pi

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/887

• Experimental support for Android

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/893

• Experimental support for MXE/MinGW-w64

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/883

• Experimental support for the POWER8

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/891

* New Remote Modules

• MinimalPathExtraction

  • Insight Journal Article: http://hdl.handle.net/1926/1332

• BridgeNumPy

  • Convert itk.Image to NumPy array’s and back

• LabelErodeDilate

  • Insight Journal Article: http://hdl.handle.net/10380/3399

• ParabolicMorphology

  • Insight Journal Article: http://hdl.handle.net/1926/1370

* Infrastructure Improvements

• An UpdateThirdPartyFromUpstream.sh script for 3rd party updates with Git subtree

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/899

• Minimum required CMake version is now 2.8.9

• Many more modules can be built as shared libraries

• ITK_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES variable during initial configuration to turn on use of common system third party libraries by default

• Release testing data tarball split from source tarball

• Gold linker used by default on Linux

* Filtering Improvements

• itk::FFTPadImageFilter to automatically pad images for the FFT implementation’s supported greatest prime factor

• itk::AtomicInt class for parallel computation

• Various performance enhancements

* Registration Improvements

• Point set SyN registration

• Point set BSpline SyN registration

* Documentation Improvements

• The ITK Software Guide is now available in HTML

  • Details: http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/890

• Updates to the Software Guide, Doxygen, Wiki and Sphinx Examples

* Third Party Library Updates

• GDCM updated to latest upstream

• KWSys updated to the latest upstream

• MetaIO updated to the latest upstream

• MINC updated to the latest upstream

* Style improvements — ITK gets more stylish with every release!

* Improved code coverage — we are at 85.4%!

* *Lots* of important bug fixes

* And much more! See details in the log below.

Changes from v4.8rc03..v4.8.0

Davis Vigneault (1):

     COMP: C++11 Warnings in thirdparty PNG module.



Matthew McCormick (9):

     COMP: Fix unused parameter warnings in itkMultiThreaderNoThreads.

     BUG: Do not output CMake log files in itkSystemInformationTest.

     COMP: Work around segfaults with VS12 in RegionOfInterestImageFilter.

     DOC: Update Wiki Examples Remote to June 26, 2015.

     COMP: Update ParabolicMorphology to address doxygen warning.

     COMP: Add missing exports in the ITKFEM module.

     BUG: Use CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY for build tree WrapITK.pth.

     DOC: Document grafting the input image in composite filters.

     DOC: Bump SphinxExample remote module version to 2015-07-02.

 

Enjoy ITK!