From picard@media.mit.edu Tue Apr 4 17:54:12 2000 Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 22:05:52 -0500 (EST) From: Roz W. Picard To: liyiwei@Stanford.EDU Subject: Re: Brodatz textures Hi -- here's my standard info about Brodatz textures -- from 1995 -- not sure what has happened to Lillian since then, but hope this helps! I haven't sent this out in a while, I think our URL has changed, but looks like you're all set w/VisTex. I can't say what to do w.r.t. the images you have; my guess is a "showing fewer than four thumbnails" is fine, based on what Brodatz wrote in his book and what Lillian agreed to in our conversations. Showing images that others can scan and use, and more than four, was seen as a violation. Roz Note from Prof. Rosalind Picard: We have a set of 512^2 8-bit images of the entire Brodatz collection, given to me on tape by a colleague at another university. I was getting ready to put them onto the vision-list public ftp site when I learned that IBM had to pay Brodatz's widow to print one of the images. I wrote to her for permission to put them on the net, with restriction to use only for non-profit research and educational purposes, with appropriate credit. She consulted her lawyer and wrote back that she does NOT give her permission to put the images on any computer network. Dover Press, the publisher of the Brodatz Album, fully supports whatever Mrs. Brodatz requests. The MIT copyright lawyer says that our current research publications which show small portions of all the images fall under "fair use" even though Mrs. Brodatz also appears to be unhappy with this current use. Although I have been unable to get written confirmation from Mrs. Brodatz, she did say to me over the phone that it would be okay for us to share the images with people if they asked her first for permission to use them. If you would like to talk with her, she can be contacted at: Mrs. Lillian Brodatz 100 Edgewater Drive Coral Gables, Florida 33133 (305) 661-5771 However, lately when people have contacted her she has refused to give permission, even for not-for-profit research with appropriate acknowledgment, which our lawyers say would be "fair use." Because of her refusal to make the data net-available, and because of the limitations of the data (unusually homogeneous, studio lighting, no color, etc.) my students and I have gathered new data which can be freely shared - please see announcement below. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ANNOUNCING: VisTex, New Color Texture & Image Database :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: As you may know, the commonly-used "Brodatz texture collection" is prohibited by Mrs. Lillian Brodatz from being distributed in any digital form over any computer network. Furthermore, the Brodatz set is very limited in variety; it is all monochrome, and consists mostly of homogeneous patterns photographed under studio lighting at an angle parallel to the film plane. The growing need for computer vision in digital libraries requires that computer vision algorithms be able to run on textures in large sets of natural color scenes, taken under arbitrary lighting and perspective. To assist in the development of more robust vision algorithms and their comparison on a common set of data, we have assembled the VisTex collection. This data can be freely distributed to researchers in digital form. The following databases are now available within VisTex: Reference Textures: Over 100 homogeneous color textures, frontal and oblique perspectives Texture Scenes: Real-world color scenes containing multiple textures Video databases will be added to VisTex in the near future. For more information please access the URL: http://www-white.media.mit.edu/vismod/imagery/VisionTexture/vistex.html If you do not have world wide web access and are interested in how to get the data via ftp, then please send mail to: vistex-requests@media.mit.edu