[Insight-developers] Patented Code : suggested Topic for Friday's TCON

[Luis Ibanez]

This topic seems to deserve some discussion,
maybe we could talk about it on friday's tcon.

Just for the record, the following are some of the
algorithms whose "Patented" status need to be discussed:

       A - Fuzzy Connectedness
       B - Marching Cubes
       C - Iterative Closest Point (ICP)
       D - Active Shape Models


For ICP what we have in ITK proper is only the Metric that
computes the array of distances from points in one set to
the closest in another set. Up to there, that probably doesn't
touches the patent, since it is only measure of mis-registration.

The code in  Examples/Registration may be dealing closer with
the ICP patent. We could remove these 3 examples from the toolkit
and leave them in text in the Software Guide.

It seems that getting in touch with the authors of the ICP
patent may be helpful. It is still possible that they may
be willing to authorize the distribution of this code with
the toolkit (perhaps a naive thought...).




     Luis