PNG Group Unconcerned About Apple's Patent

melquiades writes: "A recent story raised concerns that Apple's patent on some forms of alpha compositing was blocking the development of PNG, MNG and SVG. Not so, says Greg Roelofs, a member of the PNG group: 'The PNG group did discuss the Apple patent several weeks ago, and we decided it was completely irrelevant to PNG itself, almost certainly irrelevant to the pnmtopng utility and to PNGs animated extension, MNG, and probably irrelevant to SVG as well.' Here's the article on OS Opinion. So if it's not a big deal, why was there a general call for prior art to overturn Apple's patent? It looks like some PNG developers got worried, but the core team thinks there's no problem. Is this just a case of the right hand not knowing that the left hand is paranoid?" Once bitten, twice shy?

Comments

Re:As I understand it...

[Doomdark]

I thought so too, after first glance at the patent. However, after reading it through second time, I understood what the patent really is about.

What it is is doing 'compontent-sensitive' image blending. Instead of using single alpha mask or channel for all colour components, it uses a full mask image, that is then used for blending images component by component. When mask image is a gray-scale image, this effectively degenerates to 'normal' alpha blending. However, when using non-gray colours, blending is not linear (as with alpha blending) for the components. In RGB, for example, you could take red value from source, green from destination, and blend blue 50-50 from both, and get... um... probably interesting results?

What I would like to know is if this is useful? What kind of effects can be achieved by using non-grayscale mask images? Potentially it might produce interesting effects... But are those just curiosities?

... and no, obviously this doesn't cause any problems for PNG, which 'only' uses embedded alpha channels.