The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience

Posted Sep 8, 2009 21:58 UTC (Tue) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's hugin experience

the SIFT algorithm used by autopano-sift and autopano-sift-C is encumbered by software patents in the United States of America.

As an alternative to the SIFT algorithm, perhaps the authors of the software might be interested in the SURF algorithm. It accomplishes essentially the same task (feature point detection and description in images).

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that's patented too :-(

Posted Sep 9, 2009 0:59 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

This comment say that SURF is patent encumbered too :-(

(If anyone has more data or better links, I'm documenting this and any help'd be appreciated.)

that's patented too :-(

Posted Sep 9, 2009 17:41 UTC (Wed) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]

Yes, SIFT (US Patent 6,711,293) is patent encumbered. Since the patent holder is the University of British Columbia, it would be nice if someone tried talking to them about licensing the patent free of charge for open source programs; I don't know if anyone has done that yet.

While it has been widely claimed that SURF is also patented, I cannot seem to find an actual patent or application. It is possible that the SIFT patent covers it, since they are similar methods and the SIFT claims are fairly broad.

I'm currently working with a student on something that might or might not avoid these and other microfeature patents and work OK. Other feature description algorithms listed by Wikipedia include Canny, FAST, SUSAN, GLOH, and LESH. I do not know much about the quality and patent status of these algorithms.

that's patented too :-(

Posted Sep 10, 2009 10:05 UTC (Thu) by drnlmza (subscriber, #60245) [Link]

The hugin people have been using google summer of code projects to develop a patent-free solution. The last good overview of the status I've seen is the discussion in the "What is the status of keypoint detection and keypoint matching: machpoint (gsoc2007) and feature_matching (gsoc2008)" thread (http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx/browse_thread/th...), from especially the comments by Pablo d'Angelo (http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx/msg/b6a0ac936af1...).