Google Summer of Code Student Projects Announced

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Earlier this year VTK was selected as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization. This program encourages student participation in open source communities through three-month paid development projects. There are two student projects for VTK, one on chemistry visualization and one on algorithms from IEEE VisWeek.

Marcus Hanwell will mentor David Lonie, who will focus on creating a native implementation of tools to visualize molecular systems and electronic structure in VTK. He will also work on developing additional functionality such as plotting molecular orbital diagrams, visualizing spectroscopic tensors, animating geometry optimizations and rendering periodic crystal structures.

Jeff Baumes will mentor Tharindu De Silva, who will work on implementing and integrating three of the leading algorithms published in VisWeek 2

Visualization Toolkit Selected for Google Summer of Code

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has been accepted for the 2011 Google Summer of Code, with Kitware acting as the mentoring organization. This program encourages student participation in open source communities through three-month paid development projects. Students interested in the program apply to work on a specific project and work with a mentor at the organization over the course of the summer. This global program gives students the opportunity to work on real-world software projects and provides mentoring organizations with potential new developers. Additionally, since all the development is all open source, the projects grow and code is contributed back to the community.

Of 417 applications this year, Google selected 175 open source projects for participation, 50 of which are new to the program. There is an

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

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lynn Bardsley
Lynn joined Kitware as a Program Manager for the Computer Vision Group in July. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Union College.

Dhanannjay Deo
Dr. Deo joined Kitware as a member of the Scientific Visualization Group in August. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, his M.S. from the Indian Institute of Science and his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Xiaoxiao Liu
Xiaoxiao joined Kitware as a member of the Medical Imaging Group in September. She received a B.E. in Computer Science and an M.E. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

VTK 5.6.1 Released

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VTK 5.6.1, a patch release over 5.6.0 with a small set of improvements.

VTK now includes NetCDF 4.1.1 allowing users to take advantage of the latest enhancements to NetCDF. Additionally, the C++ version of the library is also included. A new file format, MPAS, has been added; it is a netcdf-based reader for ocean and atmosphere datasets.

Charts have significant improvements in axes layout and the ability to display multiple data series (up to four) in the same plot. Initial support for linked selection has been added to the charts in VTK and ParaView. Support for alpha blending in parallel coordinate plots has also been added.

We've cleaned up VTK's build and install rules so that developers don't have to worry about 'rpath' anymore.

Additionally, "make install" has been vastly improved on all platforms.

As always, we value your feedback. Please report any issues on the

ParaView 3.8.1 Released

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of ParaView 3.8.1, a patch release over 3.8.0 with a small set of improvements.

ParaView now comes HDF5 1.8.5. This enables developers to easily create readers and plugins for ParaView that use newer versions of HDF5. We are now including the C++ and the high level (hl) versions of the library for those who wish to use their newer API.

Among the improvements are two new file formats. The first is a netcdf based reader for MPAS format ocean and atmosphere datasets. The second, available in source form only, is a reader plugin that allows ParaView to read multi-resolution wavelet compressed VAPOR data format files. Thanks to John Clyne and Dan Legreca for contributing the VAPOR plugin.

We have improved the support for animation scripting through Python. The new API is more coherent with the rest of the ParaView Python API, avoiding the need for script writers to know minute details regarding how to create animations using proxies. Tracing cap

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

Stephen Aylward to speak at the "From MICCAI Algorithms to Clinical Translational Tools: The NA-MIC Platform" Tutorial

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

MICCAI offers a window into the latest scientific achievements in medical image computing and computer assisted interventions which will lead to the next generation of technological breakthroughs for improved clinical care. A critical step to maximize the long-term positive impact of MICCAI cutting-edge algorithms is to enable their deployment, validation and concrete use by the clinical research community for whom they were developed.

For the past six years, the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC), one of the seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC), part of the NIH Roadmap for medical research, has focused its efforts on the conversion of scientific advances from the biomedical imaging community into open-source resources for users and developers, in order to improve the availability and deployment of advanced software tools on a national and international scale.

The objective of the tutorial is to introduce the challen

VTK and ParaView to Make Transition to Git

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Over the next few days we will transition both VTK and ParaView to Git. Additional details are available on these Wiki pages (under development):

http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Git
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Git

We've already released the binaries for ParaView and the binaries for VTK will be available soon. Our timeline for the permanent transition is:

April 16: Have Kitware-maintained VTK and ParaView dashboard clients transitioned to use new "vtk_common" and "paraview_common" helper scripts that provide a single point of change for switching from CVS to Git.

April 19: Lock VTK and ParaView CVS repositories, push final changes to Git, switch all dashboards over to Git. There will be a final commit to CVS after this that adds a message() to

VTK 5.6

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is planning to release VTK 5.6 this spring. Since the previous release, 270 new C++ classes have been added. The new features in VTK include improved support for line charts and bar charts that don't depend on Qt. With this release VTK provides a new text analysis module. Another major improvement is support for parallel rendering.

This release also includes changes that improve performance. VTK can now locate and insert non-uniformly distributed points three times faster than the previous version.

We've improved GPU support in VTK. The vtkGPUVolumeRayCastMapper has been migrated from VTKEdge to VTK. VTK 5.6 contains a GPU-based real time Line Integral Convolution (LIC) with enhanced image contrast and LIC + geometry compositing for dense vector field / flow visualization. These are just the highlights. For a complete list of changes, visit the VTK Wiki and search "VTK 5.6 Release Planning."

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

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

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.

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 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

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

VTKEdge News

Google Summer of Code Student Projects Announced

Visualization Toolkit Selected for Google Summer of Code

Kitware Announces Opening of European Office

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees

VTK 5.6.1 Released

ParaView 3.8.1 Released

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

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees, Looking to Hire More

Stephen Aylward to speak at the "From MICCAI Algorithms to Clinical Translational Tools: The NA-MIC Platform" Tutorial

VTK and ParaView to Make Transition to Git

VTK 5.6

Kitware Launches Developer Blog

In Progress: VTKEdge

Paintbrushes in VTKEdge

VTKEdge Released

New Open Source Project Sites

ARL Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Contract

ARL GPU STTR: Bring the GPU closer to VTK