CTNF 17/689,394 CTNF 87973 DETAILED ACTION Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status 07-03-aia AIA 15-10-aia The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA. Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114 07-42-04 AIA A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 05/14/2026 has been entered. Response to Arguments 07-37 AIA Applicant's arguments filed on 05/14/2026 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. Applicant notes: “Accordingly, in order to expedite prosecution of the instant application, Applicant notes that claim 1 has been amended to clarify the following: (i) in order to clarify a relationship between an octree structure and attribute information, claim 1 has been amended to recite that position information and attribute information (e.g., color as in new claims 15 and 16) are present for each point, position information is encoded using an octree structure, and attribute information is encoded in association with each of leaf nodes of the octree structure; (ii) claim 1 is amended to clarify that attribute information of a node ( e.g., a second node) used for a predicted value is calculated from attribute information of a child node of the node (e.g., the second node); and (iii) claim 1 is amended to recite that a difference between the attribute information and the predicted value is encoded.” Examiner notes that the amendments indeed clarify the claims with respect to many items. However, there is still some language that remains unclear. See claim interpretations and citations of variant embodiments that appear to read on the claims below. Examiner suggests clarifying the relationship between the claimed nodes, tree leaves/roots, and layers and elaborating on the manner in which attribute information is represented in these data constructs. For example, whether these constructs partition regions of points, subsample which points are represented, represent different resolutions or other quality of encoding, and so on. There are many possibilities for coding 3D point clouds under HEVC, and it may help to narrow down the features where Applicant seeks an advantage . Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103 07-06 AIA 15-10-15 In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status. 07-20-aia AIA The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action: A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made. 07-23-aia AIA The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows: 1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art. 2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue. 3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art. 4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness. 07-21-aia AIA Claim s 1-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over US 20190311500 to Mammou (“Mammou”) in view of US 20170347122 to Chou (“Chou”) . Generally, Examiner notes that Applicant uses terminology that may be applied to different aspects of video encoding known in the art. Examiner suggests providing claim language that qualifies the terms like “attribute information, node, predicted value, transform, first/second/third component” to refer to particular video coding terms and standards in the art. Regarding Claim 1: “ A three-dimensional data encoding· method for encoding point cloud data including three-dimensional points each of which includes an item of position information and an item of attribute information, the three-dimensional data encoding method comprising: encoding items of position information of the three-dimensional points [using an octree structure]; (Prior art teaches several embodiments of this. One where “3-D scanners, etc. may capture data indicating positions of points in three dimensional space” which may be encoded as the position and attributes points in a point cloud. Mammou, Paragraphs 3, 557. Another describes “Letting point cloud PC be the input point cloud to be partitioned into patches and {P( 0), P( l) . . . , P(N-1)} be the positions of points of point cloud PC.” Mammou, Paragraphs 111-112. See corresponding applications to an encoder and a decoder in Mammou, Paragraphs 107, 110.) encoding items of attribute information of the three-dimensional points (Under the broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification and ordinary skill in the art, attribute information can be color or texture. See Specification, Page 2, line 3. Prior art also teaches this: “augmented and virtual reality applications and in the use and compression of 3 dimensional data to support them. One such form of data includes point cloud representations, where objects are specified as a series of points that are described in terms of 3D geometry and a set of attributes per point that may include information such as color , reflectance, time, or other types of information” Mammou, Paragraph 381 and Figs. 13-14. See examples of encoded color in Mammou, Paragraphs 382, 624 and similarly in Chou, Paragraph 62. The encoder and decoder diagrams as shown in FIGS. SA and 5B show how that process is performed.” Mammou, Paragraph 393.) using an octree structure; … associated with leaf nodes included in the octree structure (Mammou teaches “1. Quadtree coding may proceed as follows: … b. Recursively split the square into 4 sub-squares … ” thus the information of the point cloud point can be split into 4 quadtree leaves, which can then be further split to arrive at an octtree. Mammou, Paragraphs 510, 521-536. Mammou does not teach other tree examples. Chou teaches this example in the context of “point cloud data can be partitioned during compression [encoding], as transform coefficients. … The transform coefficients can be represented as a tree. (Specifically, FIGS. 27c and 27d show an octtree representation, but a binary tree representation as shown in FIGS. 16 and 17 is used in some example implementations.)” Chou Paragraph 298 and Figs. 27-28 that describe an octree partition as exemplified in Specification, Page 30 lines 2-4. See statement of motivation below.) wherein in the encoding of the items of attribute information: an item of attribute information of each of one or more second nodes among first nodes is calculated for the second node using items of attribute information of child nodes of the second node, (As noted above “point cloud data can be partitioned during compression [encoding], … can be represented as a tree. … an octtree representation.” Chou Paragraph 298 and Figs. 27-28. Thus, the child nodes or leaves of the tree are partitions that encode part of the information relevant to the parent and root nodes of the tree, such as attributes of a particular spatial region. See Chou Paragraphs 298-299 and Figs. 27-28. Mammou also describes an embodiment in term of layers of point clouds, where deeper layers encode additional nodes of information such as additional points, additional resolution, or additional precision. See Mammou, Paragraphs 133-145. See statement of motivation below.) the first nodes including a parent node of a current node among the leaf nodes and belonging to a same layer as the parent node in the octree structure, the parent node and the first nodes being included in the octree tree structure; Under the broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification and ordinary skill in the art, in a prediction of the values under the modes above: (a) use previously coded nodes of a tree that are in a higher layer (first nodes including a parent node) to predict the values of the current node, and (b) different nodes in this group (second and third) can be used as references. Prior art provides an example of this: For the first mode and second modes, “the missed points can be recorded by the difference from Q(d(Q)). For example, instead of signally d(Q) for the multiple missed points, a d(Q) value can be signaled for a first one of the missed points and a further difference relative to a previous difference can be signaled for the other ones of the multiple missed points that share the same reference point.” Thus, an attribute of each point in a point cloud (node) can be predicted by referencing (as delta of) an attribute Q of a parent for the first missing point (exemplifying a second node) or to a previously coded parent of another missing point (exemplifying another second or a third node), all belong to a group of parent points (exemplifying first nodes). See Mammou, Paragraphs 533, 107, 625-626. Here in the first mode the referenced Q can be from the parent nodes that are the first nodes but not third nodes, and the second mode can be from parent nodes that are first nodes and third nodes. See additional embodiments of referencing information in the same or another layer in Mammou, Paragraphs 142-145 and similarly in Chou, Paragraphs 290-292, and 299, and statement of motivation below. Finally note that there is a high degree of substitutability within the standards: “a missed point P may be located at a same location in a patch projection (same tangential and bitangential axis), but may be located at a different depth,” where in some instances a predicted node can be changed to a lower level to allow for a larger pool of the “first” nodes to be referenced. See Mammou, Paragraphs 510, 625-626. Also note that reference parameters can be signaled at any level in the hierarchy. Mammou, Paragraph 492. This indicates a wide substitutability of nodes and levels to reference and thus a wide degree of obviousness for using a particular data dependence.) a predicted value of the current node is generated using the calculated one or more items of attribute information of the one or more second nodes; and (Under the broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification and ordinary skill in the art, the value of a current (leaf) node can be predicted from the value of a second (parent) node. Prior art teaches examples of this: “For example, when point cloud frame 6 (in temporal layer 1) is compressed, point cloud frame 2 (in temporal layer 1) and point cloud frame 4 (in temporal layer 0) may be available as reference frames,” Chou, Paragraph 290 and similarly in Mammou, Paragraphs 142-145. In another embodiment, “Transform coefficients near the root of the tree are assigned to a common partition (2731), which includes very low-resolution details for all of the regions of the point cloud data,” thus a parent node can serve as a low resolution reference/prediction for the child nodes. See Chou, Paragraph 299 and statement of motivation below.) a value corresponding to a difference between an item of attribute information of the current node and the predicted value is encoded using a transform process (“the encoder (302) can determine whether or not to encode and transmit the differences (if any) between prediction values (376) and corresponding original attributes (314). The differences (if any) between the prediction values (376) and corresponding original attributes (314) provide values of the prediction residual. … For intra-frame compression, the RAHT is applied to attributes of occupied points of point cloud data, producing transform coefficients. … applied to prediction residuals for attributes of occupied points of point cloud data, where the prediction residuals represent differences between predicted values and original values of the attributes.” Chou, Paragraphs 76, 145 and similarly in Mammou, Paragraphs 530-534. See statement of motivation below.) Mammou does not teach: “ [transform process] that is a Region Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT) or a HAAR transform .” However, it appears that this technique was known in the art: Chou teaches the above technique in the context of processing three-dimensional point cloud data: “For example, an encoder uses a region-adaptive hierarchical transform ("RAHT"), which can provide a very compact way to represent the attributes of occupied points in point cloud data, … In some example implementations, the RAHT is a hierarchical sub-band transform that resembles an adaptive variation of a Haar wavelet. The RAHT traverses a hierarchical representation of point cloud data (specifically, an octtree ), …” Chou, Paragraphs 99-100, 338. Therefore, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to supplement the teachings of Mammou to perform “a Region Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT) or a HAAR transform” on point cloud data as taught in Chou, because this approach is “computationally simpler than many previous approaches to compression of point cloud data.” Chou, Paragraph 99. Finally, in reviewing the present application, there does not seem to be objective evidence that the claim limitations are particularly directed to: addressing a particular problem which was recognized but unsolved in the art, producing unexpected results at the level of the ordinary skill in the art, or any other objective indicators of non-obviousness. Where Mammou does not explicitly teach an embodiment of the claim where the recursive quadtree partition results in more than one partition level, Chou teaches the above claim feature in the context of encoding 3D information using existing video coding standards: “a hierarchical representation of point cloud data (specifically, an octtree ), starting from a top level and continuing through successively lower levels.” Chou, Paragraphs 100, 305, and Figs. 27-28. This embodiment corresponds to the example tree in Specification, Page 30, lines 2-4. Therefore, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to supplement the teachings of Mammou to partition the point data into more than one level of quadtree partitioning as taught in Chou, in order to provide for efficient compression and encoding of 3D video data. Chou, Paragraph 99. Regarding Claim 2: “ The three-dimensional data encoding method according to claim 1, wherein in the first mode, an item of attribute information of a fourth node among the one or more second nodes is directly used as the predicted value, and in the second mode, the predicted value is generated using items of attribute information of fifth nodes including the one or more third nodes. ” (Note that the lower first node information can be coded directly or itself predicted from a higher second node information to be combined with a coded difference: “the missed points can be recorded by the difference from Q(d(Q)) [calculated from a fifth node]. For example, instead of signally d(Q) [directly from the fourth / parent node] for the multiple missed points, a d(Q) value can be signaled for a first one of the missed points and a further difference relative to a previous difference [i.e. from attribute information of a previous node] can be signaled for the other ones of the multiple missed points that share the same reference point.” Mammou, Paragraph 533.) Regarding Claim 3: “ The three-dimensional data encoding method according to claim 2, wherein the fourth node is the parent node. ” (As noted in Claims 1 and 2, the fourth node can be a reference node or in a higher level partition of the quadtree and thus a parent node, for “signaling d(Q) [directly from the fourth / parent node] for the multiple missed points” Mammou, Paragraph 533.) Regarding Claim 4: “ The three-dimensional data encoding method according to claim 1, comprising: generating predicted values of fourth nodes that include the current node and belong to a same layer as the current node, (Under the broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the specification and ordinary skill in the art, the third node can be the current node or a higher tree partition of the current node. Claim 1 indicates creation of the current tree partition level as well as higher intermediate tree partitions: “a point cloud is compressed via a patching technique … such as the set of 2D images describing the geometry … 1. Quadtree coding may proceed as follows: … b. Recursively split the square into 4 sub-squares … ” thus the information of the point cloud point can be split into 4 quadtree leaves, which can then be further Split. Mammou, Paragraphs 510, 521-536.) wherein in the encoding: … the transform process is performed on items of attribute information of the third nodes to generate first transform coefficients; … the transform process is performed on the predicted values of the fourth nodes to generate second transform coefficients; … difference values between corresponding ones of the first transform coefficients and the second transform coefficients are calculated; (Note that the coded points can be encoded as a difference value between the predicted values and the target values: “the missed points can be recorded by the difference from Q(d(Q)). For example, instead of signally d(Q) for the multiple missed points, a d(Q) value can be signaled for a first one of the missed points and a further difference relative to a previous difference can be signaled for the other ones of the multiple missed points that share the same reference point.” Mammou, Paragraph 533.) and the difference values calculated are encoded, and ” (Note that the lower first node information can be coded directly or itself predicted from a higher second node information to be combined with a coded difference: “the missed points can be recorded by the difference from Q(d(Q)). For example, instead of signally d(Q) for the multiple missed points, a d(Q) value can be signaled for a first one of the missed points and a further difference relative to a previous difference can be signaled for the other ones of the multiple missed points that share the same reference point.” Mammou, Paragraph 533.) Where Mammou does not explicitly teach an embodiment of the claim where the recursive quadtree partition results in more than one partition level, Chou teaches the above claim feature in the context of encoding 3D information using existing video coding standards: “a hierarchical representation of point cloud data (specifically, an octtree ), starting from a top level and continuing through successively lower levels.” Chou, Paragraphs 100, 305. Therefore, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to supplement the teachings of Mammou to partition the point data into more than one level of quadtree partitioning as taught in Chou, in order to provide for efficient compression and encoding of 3D video data. Chou, Paragraph 99. Regarding Claim 5: “ The three-dimensional data encoding method according to claim 4, … wherein the transform process is an integer-to-integer transform, and … in the generating of the second transform coefficients, fractional portions of the predicted values of the fourth nodes are discarded , and … the transform process is performed on the predicted values after the discarding to generate the second transform coefficients. ” (Mammou describes performing integer value quantization (discarding less significant bits) before splitting the node into sub-tree units and before splitting the coded information into predicted and difference information. Mammou, Paragraphs 517-531.) Regarding Claim 6: “ The three-dimensional data encoding method according to claim 4, wherein the transform process is an integer-to·integer transform, and in the calculating of the difference values, fractional portions of the second transform coefficients are discarded, and the difference values are calculated using the second transform coefficients after the discarding. ” (Mammou describes performing quantization on integer values (discarding less significant or fractional bits) before splitting the node into sub-tree units and before splitting the coded information into predicted and difference information. Mammou, Paragraphs 517-531.) Claim 7, “ A three-dimensional data decoding method ” is rejected for reasons stated in Claim 1, because the decoding method steps of Claim 7 precisely reverse the encoding method steps of Claim 1. Claims 8-12 are rejected for reasons stated for Claims 2-6 in view of the Claim 7 rejection. Claim 13, “ A three-dimensional data encoding device ” is rejected for reasons stated for Claim 1, and because prior art teaches the following: “a processor; and memory, wherein, using the memory, the processor … ” (“FIG. 16 illustrates an example computer system 1600 that may implement an encoder or decoder or any other ones of the components described herein,” Mammou, Paragraph 635-638.) Claim 14, “ A three-dimensional data decoding device ” is rejected for reasons stated for Claims 7 and 13. Regarding Claim 15: “ The three-dimensional data encoding method according to claim 1, wherein each of the items of attribute information is color information. ” (“attributes per point that may include information such as color , reflectance, time, or other types of information” Mammou, Paragraph 381 and Figs. 13-14.) Claim 16 is rejected for reasons stated for Claim 15 in view of the Claim 7 rejection . Conclusion 07-96 AIA The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. US 20170094306 to Jia (“Jia”) relevant for teaching 3D_HEVC video coding embodiments relevant to the present application. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MIKHAIL ITSKOVICH whose telephone number is (571)270-7940. The examiner can normally be reached Mon. - Thu. 9am - 8pm. Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Joseph Ustaris can be reached at (571)272-7383. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300. 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If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000. /MIKHAIL ITSKOVICH/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 2 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 3 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 4 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 6 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 7 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 8 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 9 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 10 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 11 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 12 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 13 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 14 Art Unit: 2483 Application/Control Number: 17/689,394 Page 15 Art Unit: 2483
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