Evolution 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.<p>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.<p>Good memories.<p>Edit: typo 'tea' -> real
Reddit discussion on this - <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/fednny/sift_patent_expires_today/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/fednny/sift...</a>
More info about what this actually is: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf...</a><p>---<p>Also, reading the listing, I see<p>2020-03-06 - Anticipated expiration<p>2020-03-08 - Application status is Active<p>Is "active" some kind of obscure reference with a nonintuitive meaning, or did the patent owner reapply for the patent?
You can still download the autostitch app - have used it several times for one-off panos:<p><a href="http://matthewalunbrown.com/autostitch/autostitch.html" rel="nofollow">http://matthewalunbrown.com/autostitch/autostitch.html</a>
To what extent were the SIFT patents enforced?<p>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:<p>Self-driving car demo that recognizes road-signs? No, that's too obvious.<p>Object recognition primarily using HOG or other approaches but using SIFT as a fallback or for determining a confidence value? Go ahead.<p>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.
There 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.