The company was founded in 1998 by Will Schroeder, Ken Martin, Lisa Avila, Charles Law and Bill Hoffman to support the Visualization Toolkit. 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, large data visualization, quality software process, informatics, and data management. Kitware is one of the fastest growing companies in the country, having been included on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies from 2009 to 2012:
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%
2012: Overall Rank of 1,245, Percent Growth of 248%, 5-Time Honoree
Kitware contributes to the fields of scientific visualization, medical imaging, computer vision, data management, and informatics through the creation of 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.
