[Insight-users] SIFT and patent

[Ghassan Hamarneh]

Dear Gerald, 

You may  be interested in our Insight Journal paper on SIFT using ITK. 

	Scale Invariant Feature Transform for n-Dimensional Images (n-SIFT)
	http://www.insight-journal.org/browse/publication/207

	See also our supporting IEEE TIP paper on n-SIFT  
	http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIP.2009.2024578

Best regards,

Ghassan Hamarneh


On 2011-10-17, at 10:35 PM, Lodron, Gerald wrote:

> I looked at the public wiki of itk and found in
>  
> http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_Release_4/Enhancing_Image_Registration_Framework
>  
> the discussion item:
> 	• Add feature based registration techniques (SIFT (patented?), SURF, etc)
>  
>  
> SIFT is only patented in the US (I searched the web and could only find an US patent, please tell me if you can find another one) , but the world is much larger than the US (yes it is) J so if you want to use SIFT in Europe it is no problem… So there shouldn’t be a problem implementing SIFT in ITK…
>  
> For those who are not confirm with patents, I am a little bit confirm because I currently made one (or I am currently trying to get one, so the patent is not yet accepted):
> -      There is no “world” patent!!! Such a thing does not exist….You must make it for every country separately…
> -      And if a patent is confirmed by the US it does not lead to a confirmation in other countries (due to our patent lawyer the US patent is the easiest one to get, it is much harder to get a patent in Europe).
> -      It is not possible to patent an algorithm (e.g. it would not be possible to patent the FFT), it is only possible to patent an algorithm for a specific problem (e.g. using the FFT for image compression). So as far as I know, SIFT is patented for finding same points in two images. If someone uses SIFT for another problem (I cannot find any example, sry) he can use it without limitations…
> -      It could be, but I do not know it, that SIFT is only patented for commercial products, not for research purposes
>  
> So in my opinion there is no reason why ITK should not include SIFT…
>  
> Maybe this is interesting for anyone… Otherwise sorry for spamming
>  
> Best regards..
> Gerald
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