Re:The patent on SIFT expired yesterday
by enriquto on Monday March 09, 2020 @02:22AM
(#22523387)
> 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.
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.