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The patent on SIFT expired yesterday
- neonate 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf...
- chewxy 7y agoTIL SIFT was patented. I wonder if SURF was as well. Not that it matters nowadays
- throwlaplace 7y agoyes it is >In computer vision, speeded up robust features (SURF) is a patented local feature detector and descriptor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeded_up_robust_features https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeded_up_robust_features
- skunkworker 7y agoDoes this mean that OpenCV will be able to now include SIFT in the “free” modules. Or are there more roadblocks before including it?
- rsp1984 7y agoI'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know expired US patents enter the public domain. After their expiration the described invention can be freely used by anyone for any purpose [1]. So I think the answers to your questions are yes and no. [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-long-is-my-patent-protection-good-for.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-long-is-my-paten...
- amelius 7y agoPerhaps there are still patents in other regions (?)
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoAs others commented, the only countries where software patents work are the US and Japan. So it'd be just Japan that could have a patent in place? Don't know theh details, and IANAL. OTOH, I'd really like the patent to be inactive, it'd allow me to work worry free in a lot of things that I've had an interest in.
- abhgh 7y agoI really hope so. Including SIFT in OpenCV should be easy since they did have an implementation earlier, which they removed due to the licensing.
- brokensegue 7y agoIs sift still relevant today?
- alleycat5000 7y agoThere's a good paper on this: https://demuc.de/papers/schoenberger2017comparative.pdf https://demuc.de/papers/schoenberger2017comparative.pdf "Our evaluation confirms that, as expected, learned descriptors often surpass SIFT on all evaluation metrics. However, we also observe that advanced versions of hand-crafted descriptors perform on par or better than the state-of-the-art learned feature descriptors, especially in the more complex SFM scenarios. As such, our paper demonstrates that there is still significant room for improvement for learning more powerful feature descriptors."
- Rochetshipz 7y agoThis paper is a bit "old" by the way. An excellent paper was released a week ago : https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.01587 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.01587 Findings are mostly the same. For day/day images, with a properly tuned pipeline, SIFT is really good.
- enriquto 7y ago> Is sift still relevant today? It is extremely relevant. The fact that there exist other methods that "consistently surpass SIFT in all reasonable metrics" is inconsequential. You can say the same thing about JPEG compression, but JPEG is not going to disappear anytime soon. SIFT has very good performance (but there are better methods), it is reasonably easy to compute (but there are easier) and fast (but there are much faster). Its shortcomings are well-known and easy to understand. The combination of SIFT+Ransac is the bread and butter of image matching, and if you work on this problem you cannot seriously propose a new method unless you at least compare to it.
- OceanSunfish 7y agoImho a CNN is like a generalization of what SIFT does, so a CNN can be trained to be equivalent to SIFT, but it can also be trained with more specific features for your use case.
- echelon 7y agoHow much money did the University of British Columbia actually earn from this patent?
- peter_retief 7y agoI suspect that many patents are to stop others from patenting your work. It is a worry.
- Reelin 7y agoOpen publication (at least in western jurisdictions) serves as prior art. If you don't intend to patent, just write about what you're doing openly and often!
- peter_retief 7y agoCan any publication serve as prior art? Can I use a personal blog or do I need a certain type of publication? I know of people who have sent copies of their work in the mail to themselves to prove prior art.
- simonh 7y agoAny publication is fine as long as you can provide evidence. In fact the only thing special about publication is that it is a convenient way to demonstrate evidence of the prior art. What could be tricky about e.g. a personal blog post is proving that it was published when you say it was and that time stamps are genuine.
- eitland 7y agoFor those who are interested and doesn't know already[0] this is one of the places where blockchains and similar, older technoologies are actually useful: to provide irrefutable proof of knowledge at a given time. Note however that similar services has been done for years[1] before Bitcoins and blockchains became a thing but since they neither need multi-Gigawatt-Proof-of-Work [2] nor any kind of "Coin" that can be pumped (and dumped) it wasn't cool. [0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ (and hi to todays lucky 1/10000! : ) [1]: See here for an article that describes it: https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-blockchain https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first... [2]: but, it kind of works anyway since it would take quite some work to find the majority + the archived ones of a certain days New York Times papers and change the classifieds section.
- yantrams 7y agoReddit discussion on this - https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/fednny/sift_patent_expires_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/fednny/sift...
- exikyut 7y agoMore info about what this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf... --- Also, reading the listing, I see 2020-03-06 - Anticipated expiration 2020-03-08 - Application status is Active Is "active" some kind of obscure reference with a nonintuitive meaning, or did the patent owner reapply for the patent?
- mkl 7y agoYou can't reapply for patents like that, but I don't know what that status means. Patents often get an adjustment to their term and last a bit more than their nominal 20 years (due to delays being issued, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent
- lifthrasiir 7y agoI was also a bit confused, but it turns out that the last line is always dated today (in the local time zone ;-) and displays the last known status, which may be, and in this case definitely is, outdated.
- vortico 7y agoSee my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22525533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22525533
- aerodog 7y agoThere have been many better feature detectors introduced in the mix over the past fifteen years. This change won't make too big a difference for people in the CV community.
- Rochetshipz 7y agoMhhhhh, I'm a researcher in the field and I'd say it's a mostly inaccurate statement. The root-SIFT detectors and descriptors are still really good. If you try to match images in different conditions (day/night), then CNN based approaches are OK. Which one were you thinking about?
- johntiger1 7y agoI would argue more that SIFT was valuable in introducing a new paradigm of feature extraction/matching. It is a staple of many computer vision courses. But yes the main algorithm I'm sure is quite (practically) performant as well
- FRIEDCHICKEN 7y agoGMS feature matching trumps SIFT (and all other feature matchers) in just about every category including performance.
- alexcnwy 7y agoSIFT works really well. We use it for aligning input documents onto templates for OCR. Super cool.
- speculatrix 7y agohow did you go about licencing the patent?
- alexcnwy 7y agoDidn’t, was just RND.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoTo what extent were the SIFT patents enforced? As an undergraduate I worked as an RA for some (IEEE published) research at my uni for some robotics work and I gather that violating the SIFT patent was somewhat common when it wasn't obvious SIFT was being used, e.g. when SIFT was being used as a fungible solution: Self-driving car demo that recognizes road-signs? No, that's too obvious. Object recognition primarily using HOG or other approaches but using SIFT as a fallback or for determining a confidence value? Go ahead. And SIFT was used in a lot of private projects (proof-of-concepts, etc) or lab workers' weekend personal projects. This was in academia, but I'm curious if this attitude extends to industry anywhere.
- littlestymaar 7y agoKeep in mind that software patents are only enforceable in the US and Japan. Everywhere else in the world, you can do whatever you want (only copyright applies). For businesses, it's still a big deal most of the time because you usually can't really neglect the US market, but for academia, there is no such issues.
- nullc 7y ago> Keep in mind that software patents are only enforceable in the US and Japan. That is sadly untrue. There is a lot of confusion on this front because "software patents" are a specialized term of art that essentially means 'a patent that describes a procedure with no reference to a machine'. There was a period of time in the US when such patents were enforceable, but more recent cases have mostly changed that (Basically Diamond v Diehr in 1981 to CLS v Alice in 2014). But all this is moot, because patents that apply to the software-implemented functionality of machines are common even without "software patents". I've followed more patents on software cases in _germany_ than anywhere else. You're absolutely right about businesses. The US alone would be enough of a problem, but it isn't even the US alone that is an issue here.
- bonoboTP 7y ago> a patent that describes a procedure with no reference to a machine Essentially all software patents describe the von Neumann architecture and make sure to reference machines for this exact reason. Even when it runs on commodity PCs, the patent will still take a ridiculous amount of space to discuss how the RAM is attached to the CPU etc.
- nullc 7y agoOne time on caltrain I was amused by some very drunk people trying to explain how SIFT works to each other.
- donohoe 7y ago2020-03-09 Application status is Active Not anymore
- rkangel 7y agoI don't understand what this means. US Patents are 20 years, right? And it was applied for in 1999, so it must be expiring?
- donohoe 7y agoPerhaps. I'm just pointing out (badly) that when this was posted (March 8th depending on Timezone) to HN that new status may not have been there. That latest status updated just happened March 9th.
- vortico 7y agoGoogle Patent's interface is dumb. This means "Today (on 2020-03-09), the patent application is not in a state of pending to be filed." The fact they put this in the Events section is horrible UI. It's not an event, it's a current status as of the date the webpage was loaded. And it does mean that the patent is expired or not, it's a boolean specifying that the patent is filed (active) or pending filing. A better UI would be the text "Filed: yes" somewhere.
- MobileVet 7y agoEvolution Robotics (later acquired by iRobot) was the first licensee of this patent for robotics applications. It was very cutting edge for the time and allowed our robots the ability to recognize real world objects. Having the robot follow a book that you carried in front of it was trippy in 2002. Later we applied it to loss prevention in grocery retail with cameras at ground level watching under the cart. If we recognized anything in the ‘bob’ (bottom of the basket) we would automatically add it to the receipt. Good memories. Edit: typo 'tea' -> real
- black_puppydog 7y agowait... the concept was to have video cameras on the ground point upward in a supermarket setting? Did anyone involved in this ever stop to think "what would a person wearing a skirt say to this?" It's not exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to be able to explain away with "oh no but we really don't use it for that" no?
- derivagral 7y agoA more charitable reading is that the cameras are at ground level and stay aimed at ground level. I got the impression he's not talking about the main basket of the shopping cart, but the storage right above the wheels where you might forget pet food or bulk paper goods.
- black_puppydog 7y agookay, that might be my non-native English comprehension. I parsed "bottom of the basket" as the flat underside of the main part of the cart. And you'd have to point the cameras upwards to see that. If it's horizontal, that's a different topic.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoI had the same impression upon first read. And from a programmers perspective of what the ideal conditions for such a software would be, I also thought of a ground placed camera, pointing upwards in a way in which id could see the basket an find items that were "forgotten" in it.
- mrfusion 7y agoAnyone know other major patents expiring in the next few years? ( or that have expired recently?) It could make an interesting hn thread.
- herf 7y agoYou can still download the autostitch app - have used it several times for one-off panos: http://matthewalunbrown.com/autostitch/autostitch.html http://matthewalunbrown.com/autostitch/autostitch.html