Computer Vision News

Kitware Welcomes New Team Members in September

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

In September, Kitware welcomed four new team members and a year-long intern. Megha Pandey and Eric Smith joined the computer vision team, Sankhesh Jhaveri joined the scientific computing team, and Brenda McCormack joined the contracting team. Michael Jeulin-LaGarrigue will be with Kitware for a year while interning with the medical team.

Megha Pandey joined the computer vision group in the Clifton Park office. She holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a dual B.Tech and M.Tech in electrical engineering and communication and signal processing from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. Ms. Pandey has research experience from UNC and IIT, Bombay, where she worked on a number of notable projects including indoor scene classification, vision-based marker-less motion capture, moving object segmentation, and an RFID system with

Kitware Continues to Grow in August

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed four new employees to the team in August. Yiliang Xu started with the computer vision team, Yuzheng Zhou joined the MIDAS team, Chris Hyatt joined the systems administration team, and Ann Murtha joined the human resources team.

Yiliang Xu joined as an R&D engineer on the computer vision team at the Clifton Park office. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, earned his first Ph.D. in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and his second Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M University. As a Ph.D. research assistant, Dr. Xu worked with systems and algorithms for automated collaborative observation using networked robotic cameras. He also designed and implemented a flying bird tracking and species recognition system using active sensing, and an online panoramic

Kitware Team Grows in July

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed five new employees and one intern in July. Matthew Dawkins, Paul Tunison, and Nick Sullivan joined the computer vision group. Chris Harris joined the scientific visualization team, and Matthew McCormick joined the medical team. Benjamin Long is an intern who will be working on MIDAS for the next year.

Matthew Dawkins joined the computer vision team as an R&D engineer at the Clifton Park office. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He has previous experience as an intern for Digital Receiver Technology, a Boeing subsidiary, where he assisted in the development of embedded software applications for the protocol engineering department.

Paul Tunison started with Kitware in November 2010 as a computer vision

Kitware Adds Three Members to the Team in February

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed three new employees to the Clifton Park office in the month of February. John Tourtellott joins the computer vision team, Zak Ford is part of the systems administration team, and Michelle Kimmel is on the finance team.

John Tourtellott is an R&D engineer with the computer vision team, and has been developing software to evaluate the results of activity-detection algorithms and systems. This software will initially be used by participants in an activity recognition competition that Kitware is holding among several university teams. Prior to joining Kitware, John worked at Simmetrix as a senior software engineer, where his accomplishments include developing new software for effective filtering of quantization artifacts from voxel-based datasets and new point-locator software for efficiently detecting matched model ve

Kitware's Cutting-Edge Research Leads To Record Growth and More Jobs

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware announced one of its largest growth periods in the company’s history. Revenue growth from $5.6M in 2005 to a projected $15M in 2010, buoyed by newly awarded research grants and contracts, has extended the company’s immediate hiring needs in both the New York and North Carolina offices. Kitware is expecting to add more than 30 percent to its workforce before the end of 2011.

Kitware’s technology portfolio includes 3D visualization and informatics, scientific databases, quality software process, medical imaging and computer vision. In addition to military groups like Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Kitware often partners with premier organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. National Labs, Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Kitware is also hire

Kitware Announces Opening of European Office

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lyon office allows the Company to continue its expansion
into European markets and better service its current
European customers and collaborators

CLIFTON PARK, NY – October 25, 2010 – Kitware, a software services company that builds open-source platforms and develops advanced research solutions, today announced the opening of its European Office Kitware SAS. Located in Lyon, France, the office will be headed by Julien Jomier, a current Kitware U.S. employee with expertise in software process, medical ima

DARPA Awards Kitware $11 Million for Phase II of VIRAT Program

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Advanced research company will develop the next generation event-based query and alerting system for video surveillance

CLIFTON PARK, NY - October 4, 2010 - Kitware, a company that develops open source software and advanced research solutions, has received an $11 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to lead Phase II of its Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program. Kitware was selected to lead the sole Phase II award based on the success of their Phase I effort.

In Phase II of VIRAT, Kitware will lead the development of the second-generation VIRAT system, a revolutionary video analysis capability that filters and prioritizes massive amounts of archived and streaming video based on events; presents the high-value intelligence content clearly and intuitively to video analysts; and results in substantial reductions in analyst workload while increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.

Kitware Ranks No. 1655 on the 2010 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 172%

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Inc. magazine today ranked Kitware NO. 1655 on its fourth annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. Music website Pandora, convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Brooklyn Brewery, and Radio Flyer, maker of the iconic children’s red wagon, are among the prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“The leaders of the companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 have figured out how to grow their businesses during the longest recession since the Great Depression,” said Inc. president Bob LaPointe. “The 2010 Inc. 5000 showcases a particularly hardy group of entrepreneurs.”

Kitware, Inc. is a leader in the creation and support of open- source software

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees, Looking to Hire More

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team:

Jacob Becker

Jacob joined Kitware's Computer Vision Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Jacob received his B.S. in Computer Science and Archaeology from the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse (UW-L) in 2001 and his M.S. in Computer Science from RPI in 2009. While at RPI he researched aligning a 2D image to a 3D model and filling in holes in LiDAR data using evidence provided by a single aligned 2D image.

Aasish Chaudhary

Aashish joined Kitware's Scientific Computing Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Aashish received his B.S. (Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Devhi Ahilya University (India) in 2000 and his M.S. in Industrial Engineering with minor in Computer Science from Iowa State University. His thesis work involved researching, design

DARPA Awards Kitware a $13.8 Million Contract for Online Threat Detection and Forensic Analysis in Wide-Area Motion Imagery

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has received a $13,883,314 contract from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a software system capable of automatically and interactively discovering actionable intelligence from wide area motion imagery (WAMI) of complex urban, suburban, and rural environments.

The primary information elements in WAMI data are moving entities in the context of roads, buildings, and other scene features. These entities, while exploitable, often yield fragmented tracks in complex urban environments due to occlusions, stops, and other factors. Kitware's software system will use algorithmic solutions to associate tracks and then identify and integrate local events to detect potential threats and perform forensic analysis.

The developed algorithms will form the basis of a software prototype called the Persistent Stare Exploitation and Analysis System (PerSEAS) that will significantly augment an end-user's ability to discover novel intelligence using models of activities, normalc

Activity Recognition Conference

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, in conjunction with DARPA, is organizing the International Workshop on Frontiers of Activity Recognition as part of the DARPA VIRAT program. For more information please visit the conference website.

MIDAS 2.2 Released

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

MIDAS, Kitware's digital archiving and distributed processing system, has seen its second major release in a year. MIDAS collects, manages and process digital media. Among the new features added are:

• Better policies management
• Improved navigation
• Faster database access and rendering
• New DICOM metadata extraction and search
• Improved security for private collections
• Faster search
• LDAP support
• Improved image gallery
• Initial support for custom workflow
• New web services API
• Redesigned grid computing management

Kitware's public instance of MIDAS is available at http://insight-journal.org/midas, and is host to hundreds of freely available scientific and medical datasets.

For more information about MIDAS and to downl

Computer Vision Group Wins 6 SBIR Proposals

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

In the fall, the Computer Vision Group was awarded 5 Phase I SBIRs and 1 Phase II SBIR, all from DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office. The awards were primarily in the area of wide area video analysis and robotic vision.

Detecting and Tracking Multiple Moving Objects from a Moving Platform involves detecting and tracking moving people, vehicles and other objects near a moving robot, from cameras mounted on the robot. The University of Maryland is a subcontractor on this award. On Activity Models for Robots we plan to develop algorithms to recognize the group activity taking place around a robot, based on the observed tracks, and to determine how the robot should participate in the activity. The University of Maryland, the University of California, Berkeley and Georgia Tech will be serving subcontractors on this award. These two efforts will proceed in parallel; however, the tracking effort will provide input to the recognition effort. Both Phase I's will conclude in late summer, by whic

Kitware Awarded $6.7M DARPA Contract

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware will develop, evaluate and deploy a prototype system for content-based video retrieval

On September 11, 2008, Kitware was awarded a $6,735,503 Phase I contract for the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Kitware competed with 19 other companies for the contract.

Kitware’s team proposed building a revolutionary video analyst workstation called Video and Image-Based Retrieval and ANalysis Tool (VIBRANT). VIBRANT will leverage the most promising technologies in computer vision, video data indexing, and content-based retrieval in an integrated system that will filter and prioritize massive amounts of archived and streaming video. The most high-value intelligence content will be clearly and intuitively presented to the video analyst, resulting in substantial reductions in analyst workload per mission as well as increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.

Curr

Earth Kit Update

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Earth Kit is an open-source geospatial visualization library created through a contract with Sandia National Labs. Earth Kit is part of the new VTK view/representation architecture. This new architecture enables geographic visualizations to be easily integrated into applications that also have other visualization components. For example, an analyst may be interested in visualizing a network consisting of individuals and events. The Titan Informatics Toolkit's "graph layout" view may be used in conjunction with an "Earth" view in order to visualize the network in different ways. The view selections will be linked, making it easy to correlate information in both views.

Earth Kit is being used as part a prototype application being put together by the Computer Vision group to display video and tracks superimposed on the Earth. The work on this project began in the summer of 2007.

Dr. Anthony Hoogs. Dr. Hoogs is a internationally recognized researcher who over the past fifteen years has supervised and performed research in various areas of computer vision including event, activity and behavior recognition, motion pattern learning and anomaly detection, visual semantics, tracking, learning, image segmentation, object recognition, and content-based retrieval. Dr. Hoogs received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 for research on image segmentation, object representation and learning in computer vision. Previously, he received his MS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 for research in algebraic object representation. He graduated with a BA Magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1989.

At GE Global Research (1998-2007), Dr. Hoogs led a team of resear