ITK installation and sample program

Question

I am new to ITK and I did the following step to install ITK and use it to programme in VS2010

Downloaded ITK 4.3.1 and build it with CMAKE
The build was successful and I had a lib->Debug folder containing the libs.
Added the bin folder path to environmental vairable path.

Following is my simple code...

#include <iostream>
#include <Core/Common/include/itkImage.h>

using namespace itk;
using namespace std;

int main()
{
    return 0;
}

the above code returns

Cannot open include file: 'itkConfigure.h'

I tried searching for that header but no luck. However in C:\InsightToolkit-4.3.1\Modules\Core\Common\src I found itkConfigure.h.in file. I am really clueless about how to go about this .in file. Any help is most welcome..

When having itk compiled, did not you forget to 'nmake install' it? If you keep it in build directory, that is a kind of errors you'll be getting. — Archie

Fraser Fraser · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-06T12:04:00

The easiest way to set up your project is to use CMake again. Try creating a project with just a CMakeLists.txt and main.cpp. The CMakeLists.txt should have something like:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8 FATAL_ERROR)
project(ItkTest)

find_package(ITK REQUIRED)
include(${ITK_USE_FILE})

add_executable(MyTest main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(MyTest ITKCommon)

So say you create these 2 files in a dir called ItkProject, then from a Visual Studio Command Prompt just do:

cd <path to ItkProject>
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DITK_DIR="<path to build dir of ITK>"

The <path to build dir of ITK> is where you ran CMake from to configure the ITK project. It will contain the ITK.sln file, but critically it should also contain a file called ITKConfig.cmake. It is this file which is searched for in the cmake command find_package(ITK REQUIRED) - if CMake can't find it the configuring will fail.

Once that's been found, it sets a bunch of CMake variables which you can then use in your own CMakeLists.txt, including ITK_USE_FILE.

When you then invoke include(${ITK_USE_FILE}), this goes on to set up things like your includes paths, library search paths, and compiler flags. The path <path to ItkProject>/Core/Common/include will be added to the includes dirs, so in your main.cpp, you just need to do:

#include <Core/Common/include/itkImage.h>
#include "itkImage.h"

Anyway, the end result after running CMake should be solution file <path to ItkProject>\build\ItkTest.sln which is set up ready to use ITK.

ITK installation and sample program

2 Answers