I've asked this question on stack overflow and was suggested to ask it here as well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23052639/opencv-2-4-7-gpl-licensing-issue-with-mser-cpp
I am using openCV 2.4.7 with C++ to build an application which will eventually be distributed. As far as I understand, openCV falls under the BSD open source license.
However, I found that there is a package called features2d which has a class called MSER which uses a table called "chitab3". This table is extracted from a paper which is under GPL. This is present in the source code of modules/features2d/src/mser.cpp as follows:
"The color image algorithm is taken from: Maximally Stable Colour Regions for Recognition and Match; it should be much slower than grey image method ( 3~4 times ); the chi_table.h file is taken directly from paper's source code which is distributed under GPL."
Since the MSER class is available in features2d, when features2d.dll is distributed so is MSER and eventually chitab3 as well.
All this led to the following questions:
- What would be the best practice to prevent the usage of chitab3? I have no use for the MSER class but need the features2d.dll as it has other modules required for the application.
- If chitab3 is under GPL, even MSER, features2d and openCV should be under GPL. Why is openCV under BSD although one of it's modules is under GPL?