CTNF 18/156,193 CTNF 100461 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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 03/19/2026 has been entered. Notice to the Applicant Limitations appearing inside of {} are intended to indicate the limitations not taught by said prior art(s)/combinations. Claims 1-20 are currently pending. Response to Arguments/Remarks 07-38-01 AIA Applicant’s arguments, see Remarks I, pages 7 , filed 03/19/2026 , with respect to claims 1-7 have been fully considered and are persuasive. The 35 U.S.C §112b rejection of 12/31/2025 has been withdrawn. 07-38-01 AIA Applicant’s arguments, see Remarks II. A–C, pages 8-11 , filed 03/19/2026 , with respect to claims 1, 8 and 15 have been fully considered and are persuasive. The rejection of 12/31/2025 has been withdrawn. Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112 07-36 AIA The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(d): (d) REFERENCE IN DEPENDENT FORMS.—Subject to subsection (e), a claim in dependent form shall contain a reference to a claim previously set forth and then specify a further limitation of the subject matter claimed. A claim in dependent form shall be construed to incorporate by reference all the limitations of the claim to which it refers. The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, fourth paragraph: Subject to the following paragraph [i.e., the fifth paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112], a claim in dependent form shall contain a reference to a claim previously set forth and then specify a further limitation of the subject matter claimed. A claim in dependent form shall be construed to incorporate by reference all the limitations of the claim to which it refers. Claim 14 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(d) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, 4th paragraph, as being of improper dependent form for failing to further limit the subject matter of the claim upon which it depends, or for failing to include all the limitations of the claim upon which it depends. Claim 14 recites “The processor of claim 8, wherein the processor is comprised in at least one of:” [various systems]. The purposes of various systems is non-limiting. That is, claim 14 fails to provide limitations such as particular structures that distinguish what the claim processors are as opposed to what they are intended for. Thus, claim 14 is directed to the processor of claim 8 comprised in at least one of a number of systems. There being no patentably distinguishing characteristic between the processor of claim 17 and the systems in which it may be comprised, claim 14 fails to further limit claim 8. Applicant may cancel the claim(s), amend the claim(s) to place the claim(s) in proper dependent form, rewrite the claim(s) in independent form, or present a sufficient showing that the dependent claim(s) complies with the statutory requirements. Examiner recommends amending “comprised in” to “comprises”. 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. 07-21-aia AIA Claim s 15-16, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over “Müller” (Thomas Müller, Fabrice Rousselle, Jan Novák, Alexander Keller. Real-time Neural Radiance Caching for Path Tracing. ACM Trans. Graph., Vol. 40, No. 4, Article 36. Publication date: August 2021.), in view of “Penmatsa” (Rajeev Penmatsa and Chris Wyman. Voxel-Space Ambient Occlusion. Technical Report UICS-12-01. University of Iowa Department of Computer Science. February 1, 2012. https://cwyman.org/papers/UICS-TR-12-01.pdf) . Regarding Claim 15, Müller teaches A system, comprising: one or more processors (Munkberg, [§6, p249:6, col 1, ¶4]; All measurements are done on a system with two Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 CPUs, each having 10 cores and 20 threads. The clock frequency is 2.8 GHz with a turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz and 32 GB of memory. The system also has an NVIDIA GTX 980.) to perform one or more light transport simulation operations using spatiotemporal filtering in world-space (Munkberg, [§1, p249:1, col 2, ¶3]; Our system filters and caches shading on the surfaces of objects in the scene, which enables temporal and spatial shading reuse.) for rendering one or more filtered images on a display (Munkberg, [§1, p249:1, col 2, ¶4]; stereo/VR rendering) , wherein the spatiotemporal filtering comprises storing temporally averaged (i.e., between frames) irradiance information in a world-space using spatial hashing (Munkberg, [§5, p249:5, col 2, ¶2]; We therefore use simple direct mapped caches, rather than more complex replacement strategies, and the cache is designed to minimize thread synchronization and potential stalls.; [§6.1, Motion & Defocus Blur with Noisy Illumination, p249:6, col 1, ¶2] the cache also enables spatial reuse. [§6.1, Temporal Reuse, p249:8, col 2, ¶1 ] Temporal reuse is greatly simplified by shading and filtering in texture space as samples remain static on the surface even if the scene animates. For a given texel, we simply accumulate the current sample to the one already residing in the cache.) {based, at least in part, on a similarity between a selected pixel and one or more other pixels within both a first distance of the selected pixel with respect to a screen space and a second distance of the selected pixel with respect to the world-space}. Munkberg does not explicitly disclose a similarity between a selected pixel and one or more other pixels within both a first distance of the selected pixel with respect to a screen space and a second distance of the selected pixel with respect to the world-space. However, Penmatsa, a similar field of endeavor of displaying ambient occlusion in real-time, teaches a similarity between a selected pixel and one or more other pixels within both a first distance of the selected pixel with respect to a screen space (Penmatsa, [§6, p8, ¶1], shown below, screen-space radius; PNG media_image1.png 196 677 media_image1.png Greyscale ) and a second distance of the selected pixel with respect to the world-space (Penmatsa, [§4, p5, ¶1], shown below, square of the distance between points x and y ( i.e., world-space ); PNG media_image2.png 867 670 media_image2.png Greyscale ). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include distances in world space and screen space as taught by Penmatsa to the invention of Munkberg. The motivation to do so would be to shade a point based on the obstruction of light from surrounding geometry. Regarding claim 16, the combination of Munkberg and Penmatsa teaches the system of claim 15. Munkberg further teaches wherein the one or more processors are further to perform screen-space spatial filtering on an image including the irradiance information (Munkberg, [§6.1, Diffuse Interreflection, p249:7, col 2, ¶1]; In a diffuse scene, our texture space system can be seen as a flexible form of irradiance caching.). Regarding claim 20, the combination of Munkberg and Penmatsa teaches the system of claim 15. Munkberg further teaches wherein the system comprises at least one of: a system for performing simulation operations; a system for performing simulation operations to test or validate autonomous machine applications; a system for performing digital twin operations; a system for performing light transport simulation; a system for rendering graphical output; a system for performing deep learning operations; a system implemented using an edge device; a system for generating or presenting virtual reality (VR) content; a system for generating or presenting augmented reality (AR) content; a system for generating or presenting mixed reality (MR) content; a system incorporating one or more Virtual Machines (VMs); a system implemented at least partially in a data center; a system for performing hardware testing using simulation; a system for synthetic data generation; a collaborative content creation platform for 3D assets; or a system implemented at least partially using cloud computing resources (Munkberg, [§1, p 249:4, col 2, ¶4]; In Section 6, we explore a variety of important applications of our system, including stereo/VR rendering, interactive pre-visualization, spatial and temporal shading reuse, cached product importance sampling, and a comparison against state-of-the-art screen space reconstruction) 07-21-aia AIA Claim 17-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Müller in view of Penmatsa, and further in view of “Schied” (Christoph Schied, Anton Kaplanyan, Chris Wyman, Anjul Patney, Chakravarty R. Alla Chaitanya, John Burgess, Shiqiu Liu, Carsten Dachsbacher, Aaron Lefohn, and Marco Salvi. 2017. Spatiotemporal variance-guided filtering: real-time reconstruction for path-traced global illumination. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 2, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3105762.3105770), previously cited . Regarding claim 17, the combination of Munkberg and Penmatsa teaches the system of claim 15. Munkberg further teaches wherein the temporally averaged irradiance information includes weighted contributions from {two or more images}. (Munkberg, [§4, 248:4, col 2, ¶3]; the cache requests are explicitly written out and the reconstruction filter is a simple weighted average) . Munkberg does not explicitly disclose from two or more images. Schied further teaches wherein the temporally averaged irradiance information includes weighted contributions from two or more images Schied, [§4.1, p4, col 2, ¶2 – p5, col1,¶¶1-2]; accumulate color samples over multiple frames ( i.e., two or more images ), consistent samples are accumulated as new integrated color via an exponential moving average; See Ci, shown below. [§4.3, p5, col 2, ¶¶1-5] The integrated color Ci is weighted using weighted contributions from the previous image. See Equation 1 shown below.). PNG media_image3.png 327 467 media_image3.png Greyscale PNG media_image4.png 280 471 media_image4.png Greyscale PNG media_image5.png 715 468 media_image5.png Greyscale ) . It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include weighted contributions from two or more frames as taught by Schied to the combined invention of Munkberg and Penmatsa. The motivation to do so would be to temporally integrate color with future frames. Regarding claim 18, the combination of Munkberg, Penmatsa and Schied teaches the system of claim 17. Schied further teaches wherein the weighted contributions are based at least on one or more material properties for an object within the two or more images (Schied, [§3. Reconstruction , p4, col 1, ¶¶2-3]; In case of multilayer materials we add the per-layer albedos, weighted by their sampling probability. Our reconstruction performs three main steps: temporally accumulating our 1 spp path-traced inputs to increase effective sampling rate, using these temporally augmented color samples to estimate local luminance variance, and using these variance estimates to drive a hierarchical `a-trous wavelet filter) . It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include material property based weighted contributions as taught by Schied to the combined invention of Munkberg and Penmatsa. The motivation to do so would be to prevent overblurring texture details and increase possible spatial reuse of neighboring samples . 07-21-aia AIA Claim 19 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Müller in view of Penmatsa, and further in view of “Plank” (Planck et al., US 7864176 B2) . Regarding claim 19, the combination of Müller and Penmatsa teaches the system of claim 17. The combination does not explicitly disclose wherein the weighted contributions are based on a weight factor determined based at least on an exponential decay factor. However, Planck, a similar field of endeavor of rendering light effects on materials teaches wherein the weighted contributions are based on a weight factor determined based at least on an exponential decay factor (Planck, [Col 23: 2-4]; The subsurface scattering properties are then blended together based on the weight ratios, e.g., added together with a weighted average; [Col 10:30-21]; the material properties include attenuation factors (i.e., exponential decay factor) and scattering lengths for the material bounded by respective voxels, step 370. Because the attenuation factors and scattering lengths are parameters of the material within the object, and not just on the surface, the process is performed for all voxels that include a portion of the object…as a result, the material properties are mapped onto vertices of the voxels as a volume-weighted scattering length grid, and a volume-weighted attenuation factoring grid). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include a weight based on an exponential decay factor as taught by Planck to the combined invention of Zimmer and Fricke. The motivation to do so would be to accurately render light where scattering length differs with material and with respect to distance . Allowable Subject Matter 12-151-07 AIA 07-97 12-51-07 Claim s 1-13 are allowed. Conclusion 07-96 AIA The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Paul Sanzenbacher and Lars Mescheder and Andreas Geiger. Learning Neural Light Transport. (2020) https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03427. Lucas, US-20190088004-A1, 3D reconstruction with volume-based filtering for image processing. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to CHANDHANA PEDAPATI whose telephone number is 571-272-5325. 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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. /CHANDHANA PEDAPATI/Examiner, Art Unit 2669 /CHAN S PARK/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 2 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 3 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 4 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 5 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 6 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 7 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 8 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 9 Art Unit: 2669 Application/Control Number: 18/156,193 Page 10 Art Unit: 2669
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