SIFT patent expiry

[Daniel Jensen]

I heard that the SIFT patent has expired, at least in the US: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6711293B1/en .

(SURF, on the other hand, appears to be patented through Apr 2029.)

[Othman Bouizi]

About SURF:  https://github.com/herbertbay/SURF/blob/master/LICENSE

"Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for educational, research, and non-commercial purposes, without fee and without a signed licensing agreement, is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph appear in all copies modifications, and distributions." 

What is the philosophy of Hugin about that ?

Le mar. 10 mars 2020 à 08:38, Daniel Jensen <dmje...@gmail.com> a écrit :

I heard that the SIFT patent has expired, at least in the US: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6711293B1/en .

(SURF, on the other hand, appears to be patented through Apr 2029.)

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[Bruno Postle]

Since Hugin users expect to be able to use their work commercially, this SURF license would be unacceptable.

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Bruno

[Daniel Jensen]

Of course, that's not a patent license for SURF, it's a copyright license for the implementation there. Unless I'm mistaken, that's irrelevant to the main use of SURF in the hugin &c community, which is panomatic.

The expiration of the SIFT patent clears up the ambiguity around autopano-sift-c. The "WARNING: UBC has a patent, applications may require a license" could be removed from the README and derivative works can be made without legal reservations.

[Bruno Postle]

Somebody needs to do some research on the available options. In my experience autopano-sift-c is no better than cpfind that is already in Hugin, but I know there are some other very fast SIFT implementations, and maybe there is something that could be adopted in Hugin.

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Bruno