From help-request at octave dot org Wed Dec 28 08:55:52 2005
Subject: Re: SIFT image descriptor patch
From: Stefan van der Walt <stefan at sun dot ac dot za>
To: help at octave dot org
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:51:33 +0200

Thanks, Etienne.  It's good to be able to run those demos under Octave.

David Lowe's research might have been more popular with me if he
hadn't submitted a patent on the work:

Method and apparatus for identifying scale invariant features in an
image and use of same for locating an object in an image
    David G. Lowe, US Patent 6,711,293 (March 23, 2004). Provisional
    application filed March 8, 1999. Asignee: The University of
    British Columbia. 

Maybe someone who understands patent laws better can enlighten me, but
why woud anyone do further research on an algorithm that has been
patented?

His algorithm is very relevant to the research that I am doing, but I
am not going to invest time in emplementing an algorithm that cannot
be released under a free license.

Regards
Stefan

On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 11:32:33AM -0500, Etienne Grossmann wrote:
> 
>   Hi All,
> 
> this patch could be of interest to octave users who do image
> processing.  You can apply it to the matlab code in siftDemoV4 [1] to
> allow octave to extract SIFT image features [2] with David Lowe's
> package.



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