Towards a full patent-free pipeline for panorama stitching

by Antoine Deleforge for Hugin and panotools

Computer Vision is nowadays broadly studied and form a highly productive area of research, with a lot of various applications. Probably one of the biggest advance in this field was the SIFT descriptor, first introduced by D. Lowe in 1999. Associated to a feature point detector, it's a standard tool for image stitching algorithms. Unfortunately, SIFT is patented in the US. Pablo d'Angelo recently came up with a promising patent-free descriptor, which now needs to be fully integrated in Hugin.