DETAILED ACTION
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of Group I, Claims 1-17, 37-41 and 42-45 in the reply filed on 1/29/26 is acknowledged. Claim 46 is newly added.
Claims 18-29 are canceled, and Claims 30-36 are withdrawn from further consideration pursuant to 37 CFR 1.142(b) as being drawn to a nonelected Invention, there being no allowable generic or linking claim. Election was made without traverse in the reply filed on 1/29/26.
Claim Status
While Claims 30-36 are withdrawn, the way they are presented makes them appear to be canceled. Applicant is reminded that if claims 30-36 are intended to be withdrawn, the claims have to be there, else the office will interpret claims 30-36 to be canceled.
Claim Objections
Claims 38-41 are objected to because of the following informalities: the claims recite “the non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 40”. The claims should dependent from claim 37. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 11-12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
Claim 11 recites a convolutional neural network comprising “any combination” of numerous convolutional layer types, including 1D through 5D convolutional layers, atrous convolutions, transpose convolutions, depth wise separable convolution, group convolutions, shuffled group convolutions, and others. The limitation encompasses a broad genus covering virtually all known convolutional architectures and their combinations. However, the specification does not reasonably convey to one of ordinary skill at the art that the inventor had possession of the full scope of this genus at the time of filing. In particular, the specification fails to describe representative species or provide structural or functional commodity sufficient to demonstrate the possession of arbitrary combinations of the recited layer types achieving the claimed functionality of recovering enhanced images from reduced power inputs. Accordingly, the claim is not adequate in scope with the disclosure.
Claim 12 recites “determining one or more loss terms comprising any combination of any one or more of a logistic regression/log loss, a multi-class cross-entropy/softmax loss, a binary cross-entropy loss, a mean squared error loss, a mean absolute error loss, a mean absolute percentage error loss, a mean squared logarithmic error loss, an L1 loss, an L2 loss, a smooth L1 loss, a Huber loss, a patch-based loss, a pixel-based loss, a pixel-wise loss, a single-image loss, adversarial loss, and a fiducial-based loss.” The limit encompasses a broad genus of training objectives spanning fundamentally different optimization strategies. The specification does not reasonably convey that the inventor had possession of the full scope of this genus. In particular, the specification does not describe combinations of the recited loss functions or identify common characteristics that would allow one of ordinary skill in the art to recognize that the inventor possessed the claimed breath. Accordingly, the claim lacks adequate written description support.
Claims 11-12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the enablement requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to enable one skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and/or use the invention.
Claim 11 recites a convolutional neural network comprising “any combination” of numerous convolutional layer types, including 1D through 5D convolutional layers, atrous convolutions, transpose convolutions, depth wise separable convolution, group convolutions, shuffled group convolutions, and others, thereby encompassing a vast number of possible architectures. The specification does not provide sufficient guidance to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make use the full scope of the claim invention without undue experimentation. In particular, the specification does not teach how to select, configure, and train arbitrary combinations of the recited player types to achieve the claim functionality of recovering enhanced images from reduced-power inputs. Given the breadth of possible configurations and lack of guidance regarding their suitability, undue experimentation would be required to practice the full scope of the claim.
Claim 12 recites “determining one or more loss terms comprising any combination of any one or more of a logistic regression/log loss, a multi-class cross-entropy/softmax loss, a binary cross-entropy loss, a mean squared error loss, a mean absolute error loss, a mean absolute percentage error loss, a mean squared logarithmic error loss, an L1 loss, an L2 loss, a smooth L1 loss, a Huber loss, a patch-based loss, a pixel-based loss, a pixel-wise loss, a single-image loss, adversarial loss, and a fiducial-based loss.”. The specification does not provide sufficient guidance to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to select and combine these loss functions in a manner that will achieve the claimed image recovery functionality without undue experimentation. In particular, the specifications lacks teaching regarding how different loss functions or combinations thereof affect training performance, convergence, or image reconstruction quality in the claim context. As such, undue experimentation will be required to practice the full scope of the claim.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-17 and 37-46 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claims 1, 37, 42 and 46 recite “the plurality of parameters of the generator stage enabling substantially recovering enhanced images…”. The term “substantially recovering” is a term of degree without any objective boundary or standard provided in the claims or supported by the specification. The claims fail to specify what constitutes “recovering”, how “substantial” is measured, or what threshold distinguishes acceptable from unacceptable recovery. Accordingly, the claims are indefinite because it does not provide sufficient guidance to define the metes and bounds of the invention for one skilled in the art.
The claims further recite “enhanced images, as is taken at the unreduced power level”. This this this limitation is purely result oriented and lacks an objective standard for determining when an image qualifies as being “as if” take it at the reduced power level. The claims do not define any measurable equivalence, any tolerance range, or any specific image quality metric. Thus, the scope of the claim is ambiguous and dependent on subjective interpretation.
Furthermore, the claims recite “trained filters of the convolutional neural network enable adding information to images taken at the reduced power level to enable production of the enhanced images”. The phrase “adding information” is unclear and indefinite because it does not specify the nature of information, it does not define how the information is derived, and it does not impose any structural functional limitation on the resulting image. This renders the metes and bounds of the clay unclear. Dependent claims 2-17, 38-41 and 43-45 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph as being indefinite for the same reasons as their respective base claims from which they depend on.
Examiner’s Comments
The Office has established numerous rejections under 35 USC 112(a) and 112(b) with regard to claims 1-17 and 37-46. The scope of claims 1-17 and 37-46 cannot be determined because of the identified issues presented above. The numerous rejections to claims 1-17 and 37-46 under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) and 112(b) render applicant's claims as being so incomprehensible as to preclude a reasonably detailed search of the prior art by the examiner. The examiner has attempted to identify all grounds for rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) and 112(b). However, the number of issues with regard to claims 1-17 and 37-46 is so numerous that the scope of the claims cannot be ascertained. The examiner suggests that the applicant carefully review the claims in order to fix any and all issues that have and have not been highlighted by this office action.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to KEVIN KY whose telephone number is (571)272-7648. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 9-5PM.
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/KEVIN KY/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2671
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