DETAILED ACTION
Introduction
1. This office action is in response to Applicant’s response filed 01/20/2026. Claims 1-20 are pending in the application. As such, claims 1-20 have been examined.
Examiner’s Note: Examiner has attempted several times reaching out to Applicant’s representative on record, Vishak Ganesh (Reg. 69,018) to phone number on record (509-321-6428) in order to discuss the current double patenting rejection. However, said phone number is neither responsive nor allowed to leave voicemails. Examiner respectfully invites Applicant’s representative to reach out if further questions arise after this response.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
2. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Amendment
3. The response filed 01/20/2026 has been correspondingly accepted and considered in this Office Action. Claims 1-20 have been examined.
Response to Arguments
4. Applicant’s amendments and remarks with respect to claims 1-20 have been fully reconsidered. In response, Examiner respectfully presents that the previous nonstatutory double patenting rejection of claims 1-20 has been sustained. No Terminal Disclaimer has been received from Applicant.
5. Applicant’s amendments and remarks directed to address the previous rejections to claim(s) 1-3, 7-10, 14-15 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Gao et al., (Gao, R., Feris, R., & Grauman, K. (2018). Learning to Separate Object Sounds by Watching Unlabeled Video. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.01665, with Publication date: July 26, 2018), already of record, hereinafter referred to as GAO, have been fully considered. In response, Examiner respectfully presents that the previous rejections of said claims under 35 U.S.C. 102 as being anticipated over GAO is overcome in view of Applicant’s corresponding remarks earnestly found persuasive about the differences concerning interpretation of “co-separation loss” as amended in independent claims 1, 8, and 15. As such, said rejections are withdrawn.
Double Patenting
6. The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the claims at issue are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); and In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on a nonstatutory double patenting ground provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with this application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The USPTO internet Web site contains terminal disclaimer forms which may be used. Please visit http://www.uspto.gov/forms/. The filing date of the application will determine what form should be used. A web-based eTerminal Disclaimer may be filled out completely online using web-screens. An eTerminal Disclaimer that meets all requirements is auto-processed and approved immediately upon submission. For more information about eTerminal Disclaimers, refer to http://www.uspto.gov/patents/process/file/efs/guidance/eTD-info-I.jsp.
7. Claims 1-20 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory obviousness-type double patenting as being unpatentable over claims 1-20 of U.S. Patent No. 11,610,599. Although the conflicting claims are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because of the following reasons.
With respect to claims 1, 8, and 15 in the present Application ‘300 and claims 1, 7, 15, and 20 in the Patent ‘599 where correspondingly some of the exemplary differences are as follows. Patent ‘599 recite method and systems comprising inter alia similar features presented in Table 1 below with respect to the method and systems in present Application ‘300 as observed, similarly, both, present Application ‘300 and Patent ‘599.
As such, the present Application ‘300 claim limitations in claims 1, 8, and 15 when compared to limitations in claims 1, 7, 15, and 20 recited in the Patent ‘599 correspondingly would be obviously performed by the similar elements of the said patent since the similar elements of the present Application ‘300 is/are an obvious variant(s). Thus, In re Karlson, 136 USPQ 184 (1963): “Omission of an element and its function is an obvious expedient if the remaining elements perform the same functions as before”. Dependent claims 2-7; 9-14, and 16-20 also follow the same rationale as to corresponding independent claims 1, 8, and 15, and thus is(are) also rejected on the same reasons with regards to ground(s) of nonstatutory obviousness-type double patenting, due to their further dependency.
Allowable Subject Matter
8. Claims 1-20 would be allowable once the nonstatutory double patenting rejection of said claims 1-20 is overcome via a Terminal Disclaimer.
Conclusion
9. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Arandjelovic et al., (Arandjelovic, R., & Zisserman, A. (2017). Look, listen and learn. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 609-617)), already of record, hereinafter referred to as Arandjelovic et al., discloses, see e.g., how “…the question: what can be learnt by looking at and listening to a large number of unlabeled videos? There is a valuable, but so far untapped, source of information contained in the video itself – the correspondence between the visual and the audio streams, and we introduce a novel “Audio-Visual Correspondence” learning task that makes use of this. Training visual and audio networks from scratch, without any additional supervision other than the raw unconstrained videos themselves, is shown to successfully solve this task, and, more interestingly, result in good visual and audio representations. These features set the new state-of-the-art on two sound classification benchmarks, and perform on par with the state-of-the-art self-supervised approaches on ImageNet classification. We also demonstrate that the network is able to localize objects in both modalities, as well as perform fine-grained recognition tasks. …” (See e.g., Arandjelovic et al., Abstract).
Please, see PTO-892 for more details.
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
10. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Edgar Guerra-Erazo whose telephone number is (571) 270-3708. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F 7:30a.m.-5:00p.m. EST. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Bhavesh Mehta can be reached on (571) 272-7453. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is (571) 273-8300.
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/EDGAR X GUERRA-ERAZO/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2656
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