KWMeshVisu: A Mesh Visualization Tool for Shape Analysis

Many statistical shape analysis methods produce various types of data about the analyzed surfaces, such as p-value maps, distance maps, 3D difference vectors and local covariance matrices. This data is often too large and thus difficult to be properly evaluated on a qualitative basis. A visual representation of this data strongly simplifies qualitative evaluation by humans and thus greatly enhances the value of the statistical results. In this paper we present a new tool for visualizing various datasets on surfaces represented as triangle meshes. Our tool, KWMeshVisu, is implemented using the Insight Toolkit ITK, www.itk.org, the Visualization Toolkit VTK, www.vtk.org, and the KWWidgets user interface toolkit, www.kwwidgets.org. The source code for KWMeshVisu, as well as input data used to generate the images in this paper, is provided with this document.