Visual Programming of VTK Pipelines in Simulink

Abstract

We have created a wrapper package named SimVTK that allows VTK, and third-party classes derived from VTK classes, to be seamlessly integrated with MATLAB's Simulink interface. Our package generates a loadable Simulink module for each VTK class, which is then represented as a "block" on the Simulink canvas, and can be connected with other blocks to form a pipeline. Each block can be double-clicked to bring up a dialog box that allows introspection and control of the VTK class. After a VTK pipeline has been built, it can be run interactively from within Simulink. The outputs of the pipeline can be displayed in an interactive render window, written to a disk file, or exported to a MATLAB variable. Within Simulink, the VTK pipeline can also be connected to the ITK pipeline through the use of our SimITK package. We generate the VTK-Simulink wrapper automatically though the use of CMake build scripts, with XML as an intermediate representation of the VTK class interfaces.