The design of ITK focuses on providing a powerful and flexible platform to allow for research,

experimentation and development of algorithms. To that end one of the notable implementation details
in ITK is the extensive use of C++ templates. The ITK image class is a templated structure over both the
pixel type as well as the image dimension. The pixel type is the data type used to represent a pixel. It can
be an intrinsic integer or a real number as well as an array-like class to represent vector or color pixels.
This design choice pervades all areas of the toolkit. Image filters must be templated over the image type.
Also the data structures and objects used with the image classes are templated. These structures
include image iterators, points, and indices. The results of this interface design can be seen code Listing
1, taken from the ITK Software Guide (Ibáñez et al., 2005).