[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #50708] image package: add demosaic.m

[Hartmut]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #50708 (project octave):

I am no patent lawyer (but do have some experience in using patents). And to
me this seems to be a valid US patent of the company Microsoft.  (A company
that has money to pay lawyers...)

I will attach the (open source) original patend document as PDF. The second
last page (with "claim 1") is the most important.

The patent was filed in March 2004, and is valid since 2009. The filing date
is less than 20 years ago, so I would assume that the patent is still valid
today. The quoted patend is valid in the US, but there are also other members
of this patent family, for other countries today (namely China, Korea, Japan,
Europe and World. The last two ones aren't exactly patents). 

Matlab cites the following paper (from May 2004) in its help text of the
demosaic command:


References
[1] Malvar, H.S., L. He, and R. Cutler, High quality linear interpolation for
demosaicing of Bayer-patterned color images. ICASPP, Volume 34, Issue 11, pp.
2274-2282, May 2004.


So the patent submission was slightly earlier than this publication. This
timing looks reasonable to me if someone really wants to hold a patent on
this.

The fact that this is not patented in individual countries in Europe leads me
to the sucpicion that this might not exactly be "worth" a patent. But
currently some counties do have this method patented. Formally there are three
ways of dealing with this:
* pay money to Microsoft to purchase the right to use this patent
* take Microsoft a US (and some asian) courts to fight this patent. And pay
lawyers to do this fighting for you.
* wait some (probably just 7) years, until the patent is not valid any more,
at least the US patent.

The first two ways don't seem feasable to me for Octave code.

So what do we do about this? Should be just use the proposed code of Timothy,
that might produce lesser quality results then the Matlab function? My vote
would be: yes.



(file #40266)
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File name: US7502505B2.pdf                Size:1692 KB


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