DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
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
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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 10/24/2025 has been entered.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 18-19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Salahieh et al. (US 2021/0006834 A1).
Consider claim 18, A bit stream generated by a method, the method comprising… is a product by process claim limitation where the product is the bit stream and the process is the method steps to generate the bitstream. MPEP §2113 recites “Product-by-Process claims are not limited to the manipulations of the recited steps, only the structure implied by the steps”. Thus, the scope of the claim is the storage medium comprising instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to store data (with the structure implied by the method steps). The structure includes the information and samples manipulated by the steps.
“To be given patentable weight, the printed matter and associated product must be in a functional relationship. A functional relationship can be found where the printed matter performs some function with respect to the product to which it is associated”. MPEP §2111.05(I)(A). When a claimed “computer-readable medium merely serves as a support for information or data, no functional relationship exists. MPEP §2111.05(III). The storage medium storing the claimed bitstream in claim 18 merely services as a support for the storage of the bitstream and provides no fictional relationship between the stored bitstream and storage medium. Therefor the structure bitstream, which scope is implied by the method steps, is non-functional descriptive material and given no patentable weight. MPEP §2111.05(III). Thus, the claim scope is just a storage medium comprising instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to store data and is anticipated by Salahieh, which recites a storage medium comprising instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to store data ([0141] – [0148]).
Consider claim 19, Salahieh teaches pruned pixel of a pruned view has a determined value ([0027] – [0028], [0032] – [0034], [0066] – [0068], [0078]).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
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.
Claim(s) 20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Salahieh et al. (US 2021/0006834 A1) in view of Shin et al. “[MPEG-I Visual] CE2-Related: Priority based View Pruning.” (also cited in the IDS filed on 3/25/2022).
Consider claim 20, Salahieh teaches the acyclic graph is signaled in the data stream as a list comprising, for each view of said multi-view frame, linked views ([0021], [0024] – [0030], [0034], [0074], [0151] of Salahieh. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. Shin provides several criteria to determine pruning order. Section 4 of Shin).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate the known element of an acyclic graph linking views because such incorporation would reduce certain amount of BD-Rate with similar pixel rate. Section 3.
Claim(s) 23 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Salahieh et al. (US 2021/0006834 A1) in view of Li et al. (US 2018/0288415 A1)
Consider claim 23, Salahieh teaches all the limitations in claim 19 but does not explicitly teach the determined value is not a color value or a depth value.
Li teaches the determined value is not a color value or a depth value ([0060], Fig. 7, Fig. 8a, and Fig. 8b).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate the known technique of mapping the base color values to index values such that the determined value is not a color value of a depth value because such incorporation would result in more efficient coding. [0107].
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-12, 16-17, 21-22, 24-26 are allowed.
Allowable Subject Matter
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
The present invention is directed to a method for encoding views of a multi-view frame in a data stream. Independent claims 1 and 4 identify the uniquely distinct feature “obtaining an explicitly stored acyclic graph data structure linking views of the multi-view frame, links of the acyclic graph being representative of a pruning precedence relation, at least one basic view of the multi-view frame having no pruning precedence link; pruning pixels of views of the multi-view frame in an order determined so that a given view is pruned after views linked to the given view by a pruning precedence link, wherein at least one pixel of the given view is pruned when the at least one pixel corresponds to information encoded in a pixel of a view transitively linked to the given view by a pruning precedence link such that the pruning is executable in a single pass along paths of the acyclic graph without requiring sequential multi-phase pruning; and encoding the acyclic graph as a qraph structure includinq identifiers for nodes and edges, the at least one basic view, and the pruned views of the multi-view frame in the data stream."
Independent claims 7 and 10 identify the uniquely distinct feature “obtaining pruned views of the multi-view frame from the data stream and at least one basic view being unpruned; obtaining an explicitly stored acyclic graph data structure from the data stream, the acyclic graph linking views of the multi-view frame, links of the acyclic graph being representative of a pruning precedence relation, the at least one basic view of the multi-view frame having no pruning precedence link; and generating a viewport frame according to a viewing pose by determining the contribution of each view of the multi-view frame as a function of the pruning precedence relations of the acyclic graph, wherein the reconstruction of pruned pixels from the acyclic graph is performed in a single pass along graph paths without requiring sequential multi-phase pruning and without use of patch-group metadata, weights per patch, or per-visibility lists."
The closest prior arts, Salahieh et al. (US 2021/0006834 A1) and Shin et al. “[MPEG-I Visual] CE2-Related: Priority based View Pruning.” disclose the conventional method, either singularly or in combination, fail to anticipate or render the above underlined limitations obvious.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
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/TAT C CHIO/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2486