VTKEdge News

Kitware Launches Developer Blog

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware launched its first developer blog today which will be penned by Kitware's Research and Development Team and Corporate Leadership. The blog was designed to help our user community and those with an interest in specific Kitware toolkits, products or people, keep up with our current thoughts and interests.

Our team is free to write about whatever topic they'd like (of course, without violating any legal agreements). So what you see on the blog may not necessarily represent the views of Kitware as a whole, and you may even see dissenting opinions in the comments posted by other Kitware employees. Comments have been enabled so that you can interact with the posts as they go live. We encourage our readers to provide suggestions and engage in a dialogue with us and each other through the Kitware blog. While we do allow negative feedback, we will remove any spam, profanity, or excessively

In Progress: VTKEdge

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

VTKEdge has grown rapidly over the past few months, with several significant functionality areas under active development. The following is a brief description of three such functionality areas.

A framework has been added to VTKEdge to facilitate the serialization and deserialization of vtkObjects. Serialization "helpers" provide the ability to handle vtkObjects in general (such as existing classes in VTK; enabling an existing VTK class requires only a small amount of work), while vtkKWESerializableObject (a thin subclass of vtkObject) provides a simple serialization framework to its subclasses.

The ObjectTree structure was added to VTKEdge to allow a general but flexible method of associating properties (such as visual properties), transforms and other attributes to nodes (each containing a vtkObject) in the tree. Implemen

VTKEdge Released

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has enabled public read access to the VTKEdge source code repository. VTKEdge is still in the alpha stage right now, with continued development expected over the next few months. Highlights of the initial release include:

Advanced GPU volume ray casting
Illuminated lines painter
Surface LIC painter
GPU accelerated filters for 2D LIC
Feldkamp reconstruction (CPU and GPU versions)
GPU accelerated array processing
Powerful pixel / voxel editing widgets

Please visit the VTKEdge web site at vtkedge.org for additional information and download instructions.

Paintbrushes in VTKEdge

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Paintbrushes are a powerful set of extensible editing tools for pixel /voxel values. A brush is an arbitrary 2D or 3D stencil that can be interactively painted onto a labelmap image. The shape of the stencil corresponds to the shape of the brush. For example, the stencil and corresponding brush shapes can be ellipsoids or cubes. Furthermore, an "underlying" image, companion to the labelmap image, can also be used by the paintbrushes. In particular, the paintbrushes can perform computations on that underlying image to modify the painting process. For example, it is easy to create a paintbrush for which the paint is only deposited in the labelmap image when the underlying image's intensities are within a specific range. More complex operations can also be performed, such as region growing using the underlying image to constrain how the paint spreads out from the brush.

The paintbrushes were developed as part of Kitware's Maverick Library for application development. They were funded, in part, by the

ARL Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Contract

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

For the past two years Kitware has had funding from the Army Research Labs to explore the use of GPU (Graphics Processing Units) for visualization. This was an STTR in collaboration with University of Maryland, College Park. One of the outcomes of this funding was the birth of VTKEdge. Fueled by contributions from several other projects and funding sources, VTKEdge is now blooming into a collection of tools for improved visualization. All of the components that we talk about here have made it into VTKEdge.

We’ve developed a framework for incorporating GLSL or CUDA-based algorithms into VTK. A collection of classes that abstracts the OpenGL data structures for transferring data to and from GPU memory are provided. Using this infrastructure, writing new algorithms that exploit the parallelism provide

New Open Source Project Sites

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In late October Kitware will launch the new ParaView (paraview.org) and CDash (cdash.org) websites. The new CMake (cmake.org) site went live at the beginning of September. Additionally, a brand new site for the new VTKEdge toolkit (vtkedge.org) will go live in late October as well. The new site design is focused on providing researchers and developers with streamlined access to information and will provide users with a multitude of resources to assist in development, creating easier access to licensing information, related publications, ways to get involved with the projects, and resources for development and support. Additionally, the new sites are uniformly designed so that users will find consistency when accessing information from project to project.

ARL GPU STTR: Bring the GPU closer to VTK

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

One of the common complains about large projects such as VTK/ParaView is that they are not bleeding edge. The academic community hammers out papers which sometimes have real world applications however, it takes a long time before such technologies seep into mainstream toolkits/products. One of the goals of this STTR funded by the Army Research Lab (ARL) is to incorporate some of this academic research into VTK/ParaView.
GPU technologies have been all the rage in recent years. With NVidia leading the way for general purpose computing on the GPU, there has been tremendous enthusiasm in the scientific community to redesign existing algorithms to exploit the massive parallelism provided by modern graphics processors. This STTR focuses on exploiting the GPU for visualization-related processing and rendering. Some of the major components we've developed under this project are:

Line Integral Convolution
Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is a technique for vector field visualizatio