Maintain Your Edge with Kitware

NVIDIA Holoscan Advanced Visualization

Kitware partnered with NVIDIA to enhance Holoscan, a full-stack solution for high-performance AI and AR applications, by integrating the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). Holoscan’s hardware, featuring Jetson AGX Xavier™ and Jetson™ AGX Orin SoCs, discrete GPUs, and high-speed network interface cards, is used in industries such as manufacturing, robotic surgery, and self-driving cars. Holoscan developers share reusable parts and apps through HoloHub, but it lacked advanced visualization options. We added VTK to enable rapid application prototyping, allowing researchers to understand and display results early. This improvement also simplifies the creation of monitoring dashboards and debugging views. Kitware enhanced existing platforms with powerful visualization tools, making data processing more efficient and effective.

Read more

Optimizing AI-Driven Surgical Guidance

We specialize in harnessing the power of edge computing to optimize AI-driven healthcare solutions, including real-time image processing, robotic surgery assistance, and dynamic intraoperative decision support. A new medical device customer selected Kitware for their project based on our expertise in migrating applications and pipelines to efficiently utilize GPU hardware and execution frameworks, ensuring maximum performance. We’re working with this customer to develop custom real-time data processing operators tailored to enhance surgical workflows, providing precise and reliable tools for advanced medical procedures.

Assessing Urban Threats with DARPA URSA

For the DARPA URSA project, Kitware developed an autonomous camera system to help mission commanders accurately classify potential threats and non-threats within a city’s population. The system integrated fixed and moving ground-based cameras with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), each equipped with edge computing systems. These cameras processed each frame at ~4 fps using advanced deep neural networks (DNN) to analyze and identify individuals in real-time. Our state-of-the-art DNN frameworks support real-time operations on low Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) hardware. This edge computing solution allows for camera deployment across wide geographical areas and diverse conditions. For example, this technology would allow a property management company to remotely monitor its properties for suspicious activity without taking up extensive bandwidth or large server racks.

Read more

Counting Seals with NOAA KAMERA

Kitware developed the KAMERA system to help NOAA count seals in the frigid waters off Alaska’s coast. The system includes nine cameras in three triplets, each supported by a ruggedized GPU compute system, an inertial navigation system (INS) for synchronization and localization, a local NAS (40TB) for data storage, and a Digital Acquisition Device (DAQ) for synchronized camera triggering. All deep learning, storage, and management functions run onboard a NOAA aircraft. This setup allows real-time analysis during flight, enabling immediate adjustments to the mission without returning to a remote base. The ability to make in-flight decisions ensures accurate and efficient data collection. This advanced system showcases Kitware’s expertise in integrating deep learning and edge computing for complex environmental monitoring tasks.

Read more

Deep Sea Exploration with DARPA ANGLER

For the DARPA ANGLER project, Kitware helped develop next-generation autonomous underwater robotic systems for deep-sea navigation, large-area surveying, and object manipulation on the seafloor. Our focus was on improving object detection in undersea video. We enhanced video quality by using learning approaches to improve lighting and remove occlusions like marine snow. Additionally, we modified conventional training data to resemble undersea imagery for better accuracy. Our modules were deployed on edge computing platforms, including Jetson NANO and Jetson Xavier, to measure their performance. You can leverage Kitware’s expertise to tackle similar complex challenges in marine environments.

Read More