[newsclues]

This is the sort of project that should be developed and released via open source from academia.

Audio and video codecs, document formats like PDF, are all foundational to computing and modern life from government to business, so there is a great incentive to make it all open, and free.

[mike_hearn]

Universities love patent licensing. I don't think academia is the solution you're looking for.

[yxhuvud]

The solution to that is to remove the ability to patent codecs.

[master-lincoln]

I think we should go a step further and remove the ability to patent algorithms (software)

[immibis]

Some people even think we should remove intellectual property.

[newsclues]

So do companies.

But education receives a lot of funding from the government.

I think academia should build open source technology (that people can commercialize on their own with the expertise).

Higher education doesn’t need to have massive endowments of real estate and patent portfolio to further educ… administration salaries and vanity building projects.

Academia can serve the world with technology and educated minds.

[oblio]

You're also describing technologies with universal use and potential for long term rent seeking.

Basically MBA drool material.

[newsclues]

Yeah, and if MBAs want to reap that reward, they need to fund the development exclusively without government funding.

[nullc]

Incentives in academia as things are is ... uh. Not so awesome.

My expectation from experience when implementing something from a DSP paper is that the result will be unreproducable without contacting the authors for some undisclosed table of magic constants. After obtaining it, the results may match but only for the test images they reported results on. Results on anything else will be much worse.

Also it's normal for techniques from the literature to have computational/memory bandwidth costs two orders of magnitude greater than justified for even their (usually exaggerated) stated levels of performance.

And then their comparison points are almost always inevitably implemented so naively as to make the comparison useless.

It's always difficult because improvements in this domain (like many other engineering domains) are significantly about tradeoffs ... and tradeoffs are difficult to weigh in a pure research environment without the context of concrete applications. They're also difficult to weigh with implementation cleverness having such a big impact particularly since industry heavily drains academia of naturally skilled software engineers.

And as other comments have pointed out, academia is in some sense among the worst of the patent abusers. They'll often develop technology just far enough to lay patent mines around the field, but not far enough to produce something useful out of it. The risk that you spend the significant effort to turn a concept into something usable only to have some patent holder show up with a decade old patent to shake you down is a big incentive against investment.