[Insight-users] SIFT and patent

[Lodron, Gerald]

Oh thanks. 

I am currently not using SIFT but i was browsing on the wiki of itk because I was interested on new features of version 4 and then I saw that SIFT with the hint for patented. And therefore I thought I could make maybe some things clearer for anyone...

I am very interested on the new GPU functionalities of ITK... But I will only swap my project to version 4 if the beta phase is finished...

Does anyone know if ITK will use superbuild for installing external libraries like OpenCL etc.? It is a really nasty thing to install and build every external library separately (in my whole life I was never able to run ITK with FFTW, maybe I am too stupid)... I already know it from other projects (MITK) and I really like it, it makes the build process much comfortable. Maybe you also want to create an example HelloWorld git repository which loads and configures ITK over superbuild automatically (this could be done in MITK which is really cool), this HelloWorld could then be used as initial project template if anyone want to make its own ITK project.

Best regards



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Ghassan Hamarneh [mailto:hamarneh at gmail.com] 
Gesendet: Dienstag, 18. Oktober 2011 22:56
An: Lodron, Gerald
Cc: Insight users (insight-users at itk.org); Warren Cheung
Betreff: Re: [Insight-users] SIFT and patent

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_Fra
> mework
>  
> 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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