Kitware - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Kitware, Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Clifton Park, New York. The company specializes in the research and development of open-source software

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

in the fields of computer vision

Computer vision

Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...

, medical imaging

Medical imaging

Medical imaging is the technique and process used to create images of the human body for clinical purposes or medical science...

, visualization

Scientific visualization

Scientific visualization is an interdisciplinary branch of science according to Friendly "primarily concerned with the visualization of three-dimensional phenomena , where the emphasis is on realistic renderings of volumes, surfaces, illumination sources, and so forth, perhaps...

, 3D data publishing and technical software development

Software development

Software development is the development of a software product...

. In addition to software development, the company offers other products and services such as books, technical support, consulting and customized training courses.

Kitware is one of the fastest growing companies in the country, having been included on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies for the past three years:

2008: Overall Rank of 3,026, Percentage Growth of 117.3
2009: Overall Rank of 3,330, Percentage Growth of 76.1
2010: Overall Rank of 1,655, Industry Rank of 113, Percentage Growth of 172
2011: Overall Rank of 1,572, Percent Growth of 175%

Locations

Kitware, Inc. Headquarters: Clifton Park, NY (28 Corporate Drive, Clifton Park, NY 12065)
Kitware, Inc. Branch Office: Chapel Hill, NC
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...

(101 East Weaver Street, Carrboro, NC 27510)
Kitware SAS Headquarters: Lyon, France
Lyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

(20 rue de la Villette, 69328 Lyon Cedex 03, France)

History of Kitware

The company was founded in 1998 by Will Schroeder, Ken Martin, Lisa Avila, Charles Law and Bill Hoffman to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)

VTK

The Visualization Toolkit is an open-source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization. VTK consists of a C++ class library and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. Kitware, whose team created and continues to...

. VTK was initially created in 1993 by Will, Ken and Bill Lorensen as companion software to “The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics,” originally published by Prentice-Hall. As VTK was released open source, a user community developed around the software and the founders of Kitware took this opportunity to start the business. With time, the company expanded its focus and offerings to include development in other areas such as biomedical imaging

Medical imaging

Medical imaging is the technique and process used to create images of the human body for clinical purposes or medical science...

, large data visualization

Scientific visualization

, quality software process

Software development process

A software development process, also known as a software development life cycle , is a structure imposed on the development of a software product. Similar terms include software life cycle and software process. It is often considered a subset of systems development life cycle...

, informatics

Data visualization

Data visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information"....

, and data management.

The consistent growth of the company has enabled the opening of two additional offices. The Chapel Hill, North Carolina office opened in 2005 and Kitware SAS, the European office, opened in 2010 in Lyon, France.

Open Source

Kitware actively contributes to and maintains several leading Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

software packages, including:

VTK: The Visualization Toolkit
VTK
The Visualization Toolkit is an open-source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization. VTK consists of a C++ class library and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. Kitware, whose team created and continues to...
ITK: The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit
Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit
ITK is a cross-platform, open-source application development framework widely used for the development of image segmentation and image registration programs. Segmentation is the process of identifying and classifying data found in a digitally sampled representation. Typically the sampled...
CMake
CMake
CMake is a cross-platform, open-source system for managing the build process of software using a compiler-independent method. It is designed to support directory hierarchies and applications that depend on multiple libraries, and for use in conjunction with native build environments such as Make,...

: Cross-platform build management tool
CDash: Web-based test reporting dashboard
ParaView
ParaView
ParaView is an open source, freely available program for parallel, interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail models to maintain interactive framerates for large datasets. It is an...

: Parallel visualization application
MIDAS: Scientific data management tool
IGSTK
IGSTK
The Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit is a software package oriented to facilitate the development of image-guided surgery applications....

: Image guided surgery toolkit
Insight Journal
Insight Journal
The Insight Journal is an electronic scientific journal that covers the reproducibility of technical reports in the areas of image analysis and visualization...
3DSlicer
3DSlicer
3D Slicer is a free, open source software package for image analysis and scientific visualization. Slicer is used in a variety of medical applications, including autism, multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus erythematosus, prostate cancer, schizophrenia, orthopedic biomechanics, COPD, cardiovascular...

Areas of Expertise

Kitware contributes to the fields of scientific visualization, medical imaging, computer vision, data management, and informatics. The company employs an agile development process to create high-quality software.

Recent publications highlighting the company's work include:

Medical Imaging

Bayesian Regularization Applied to Ultrasound Strain Imaging by McCormick M., Rubert N., Varghese T
Agile methods for open source safety-critical software by Gary K., Enquobahrie A., Ibanez L., Cheng P., Yaniv Z., Cleary K., Kokoori S., Muffih B., Heidenreich J.
Sensors Management in Robotic Neurosurgery: the ROBOCAST project by Vaccarella A., Comparetti M., Enquobahrie A., Ferrigno G., De Momi E.
The Need for Open Imaging Archives: How Open Imaging Archives Benefit Algorithm Development by R. Avila

Scientific Visualization

Streaming-Enabled Parallel Data Flow Framework in the Visualization Toolkit by Vo H.T., Comba J.L., Geveci B., Silva C.T.
Verifying Scientific Simulations via Comparative and Quantitative Visualization by Ahrens J., Heitmann K., Peterson M., Woodring J., Williams S., Fasel P., Ahrens C., Hsu C., Geveci B.
Multi-Resolution Streaming in VTK and ParaView by DeMarle D., Woodring J., Ahrens J.

Computer Vision

A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Event Recognition in Surveillance Video by Oh S., Hoogs A., Perera A., Cuntoor N., Chen C-C., Lee J.T., Mukherjee S., Aggarwal J.K., Lee H., Davis L., Swears E., Wang X., Ji Q., Reddy K., Shah M., Vondrick C., Pirsiavash H., Ramanan D., Yuen J., Torralba A., Song B., Fong A., Roy-Chowdhury A., Desai M.
Vehicle Surveillance with a Generic, Adaptive, 3D Vehicle Model by Leotta M., Mundy J.
Augmenting aerial earth maps with dynamic information from videos by Kim K., Oh S., Lee J., Essa I.

Data Management

Remote Visualization of Large Datasets with MIDAS and ParaViewWeb by Jomier J., Jourdain S., Ayachit U., Marion C.

Additional Readings

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.