Three Student Projects for VTK Selected for GSoC 2014

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014 has announced its list of accepted projects. Three of these projects were proposed for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK).

“Ensemble Vector Fields for VTK” was proposed by Brad Eric Hollister, who will work with Kitware’s Berk Geveci. To add visualization support for ensemble vector fields, Brad proposes several tasks for the project. The first is “loading ensemble data from the NetCDF file format. The second is computation of finite-time variance analysis (FTVA) for an EVF. The third is to provide visualization of clusters in the variance data from FTVA. Lastly, as an optional item if time permits, is the inclusion of TRACLUS, a trajectory clustering algorithm for use within VTK.”

“Extensions for Geospatial and Climate based visualizations in VTK” was proposed by Jatin Parekh. For the project, Jatin will work with Kitware’s Aashish Chaudhary. The goal of the project involves “adding a few extensions to the VTK library to support Geospatial and Climate based visualizations in the VTK library. The proposed work can be divided into four tasks: 1) Add new features to existing filters such as neat labelling of the contours. 2) New readers to read LIDAR dataset and GeoJSON geometry data into VTK. 3) Improve handling of time in VTK. 4) Implement tile rendering in VTK (optional – time permitting).”

 “Supporting a Visualization Grammar” was proposed by Marco Cecchetti, who will work with Kitware’s Jeff Baumes. The goal of the project is to “provide the ability to create plots and charts with the VTK framework by a simple declarative language. In order to achieve this goal a visualization grammar similar to the one utilized by the Vega JavaScript library will be mapped to VTK data structures and to specific classes that will be designed for supporting geometry objects and marks.”

Kitware looks forward to working with Brad, Jatin, and Marco on their proposed projects. For more information on these projects, please visit http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2014/vtk.