The patent on SIFT expired yesterday

Does this mean that OpenCV will be able to now include SIFT in the “free” modules. Or are there more roadblocks before including it?

Is sift still relevant today?

There's a good paper on this:

https://demuc.de/papers/schoenberger2017comparative.pdf

"Our evaluation confirms that, as expected, learned descriptors often surpass SIFT on all evaluation metrics. However, we also observe that advanced versions of hand-crafted descriptors perform on par or better than the state-of-the-art learned feature descriptors, especially in the more complex SFM scenarios. As such, our paper demonstrates that there is still significant room for improvement for learning more powerful feature descriptors."

More info about what this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transf...

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Also, reading the listing, I see

2020-03-06 - Anticipated expiration

2020-03-08 - Application status is Active

Is "active" some kind of obscure reference with a nonintuitive meaning, or did the patent owner reapply for the patent?