Seamless VTK-ITK pipeline connection for image data handling

Often times developers face the need to connect ITK and VTK pipelines to handle image data. For this purpose, image data importer and exporter classes have been implemented both in ITK and VTK. However, as evident from frequent questions in the ITK and VTK users and developers mailing list, usage of these classes is not straight forward. Furthermore, the difficulty gets more challenging with the need to handle different pixel types. For these reasons, an effort was made to write Image IO classes that encapsulate all the intricacies and provide users with easy to use API. This article describes these Image IO classes and present an example to demonstrate how to use these classes.