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

1. Downloaded ITK 4.3.1 and build it with CMAKE
2. The build was successful and I had a lib->Debug folder containing the libs.
3. 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..

Answer 1

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.