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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 1/26/2026 has been entered.
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claim(s) 1-12 and 14-21 have been considered but are moot because they relate to newly amended limitations for which new grounds of rejection based on Su are provided.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
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 and 14-15 recite the limitation "re-evaluating a current network bandwidth" however there is no corresponding recitation of ‘evaluating a current network bandwidth’ and hence the claim to re-evaluating is unclear as it implies repetition of a process that was never initially preformed. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
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.
Claim(s) 1-2, 5-6, 12, 14-16 and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mori et al (2001/0007575) in view of Sato (2017/0345187) and in further view of Su et al (2014/0241415).
In regard to claim 1 Mori discloses a method for coding videos (Mori Figs 2-14) comprising:
predicting a precoding bit rate of a current macroblock subset in response to a coding the current macroblock subset in a current video frame (Mori pars 129-133 note rate control unit 2 determining a target number of bits TSi and T in response to coding a slice, further note Fig. 12 and par. 151 step 201 a slice is comprised of a number of macroblocks MB which is a subset of the total macroblocks of a frame),
based on an actual coding weight of each macroblock subset of the current video frame in a previous video frame (Mori Fig. 11 and par. 143 note obtaining Ci indicating a degree of difficulty of each slice of the previous picture), and
an actual coding bit rate of each coded macroblock subset in the current video frame (Mori Fig. 11 and par 142-1433 note obtaining Cg the cumulative number of bits used in coding the current picture thus far) ,
wherein the video frame comprises a plurality of macroblocks (Mori Fig. 3 and par. 51 note image divided into macroblocks), the plurality of macroblocks being grouped into a plurality of subsets (Mori Fig. 12 and pars 116 and 151 note a slices is comprised of a group of macroblocks, which is a subset of the total macroblocks of a frame),
the actual coding weight represents coding quality differences among the macroblock subsets, and the actual coding weight of each coding macroblock subset in the previous video frame is determined based on an actual coding bit rate of each macroblock subset in the previous video frame (Mori pars 136, 143 160, particularly note par. 143 obtaining the degree of difficulty Ci for slices in the previous frame, the degree of difficulty indicating differences in coding quality of the slices, further note 160 the degree of difficulty Ci is computed based on the number of bits in a slice BSi which is, the ‘actual coding rate of a macroblock subset’);
the macroblock subsets comprising at least one coded macroblock subset (Mori par. 116 and 151 note the picture is divided into several slices which are ach comprised of plural macroblocks); and
acquiring a target coding quantization parameter of the current macroblock subset in the current video frame (Mori Fig. 11 and par. 145 note determining a quantization scale, q_scale) by adjusting an actual coding quantization parameter of the current macroblock subset in the previous video frame, based on a bitrate difference between the precoding bit rate and a pre-allocated bitrate of the current video frame at a current network bandwidth (Mori Figs. 13-14 and generally pars 181-193 note Fig. 13 step 31 initializing a quantization to a reference scale q_st which is used at the start of every frame and is thus used in a macroblock subset of every previous frame, further note Fig. 13 step 305 determining a difference D based on a pre--allocated target bitrate fCg and a precoding bitrate T, finally note Figs. 6 and 14 for determining a quantization scale based on the difference D).
Mori discloses that the actual coding weight determined based on an actual coding bit rate of each macroblock subset in the previous video frame (Mori pars 136, 143 160). It is noted that Mori does not disclose that the actual coding weight is determined based on an overall bitrate of the previous frame.
However, Sato discloses determining an actual coding weight for a set of macroblocks which represents coding quality differences among the macroblock subsets (Sato pars 138-147 note compression difficulty ratio DIFFICUTLY_SCALE(SLICE_K) as the actual coding weight indicating the texture quality difference between slices as noted in par. 144), and
the actual coding weight of each coding macroblock subset in the previous video frame is determined based on an actual coding bit rate of each macroblock subset in the previous video frame (Sato pars 138-140 note the difficulty ratio value DIFFICULTY(SLICE_K) which is computed based on the coding rate of a slice BITS(SLICE_K), further note par. 146 values calculated based on the contents of the previous frames) and
an overall actual coding rate of the previous video frame (Sato Fig. 11 and pars 141-143 note DIFFICUTLY SCALE(SLICE_K) is computed based on the average difficulty of all slices of the frame AVG_DIFFICULTY, since the difficulty (DIFFICULTY(SLICE_K)) is based on coding rate (BITS(SLICE_K)) the average difficulty value is based on the overall bitrate of the frame since it is computed using the bitrate of all slices in the frame, further note par. 146 values may be calculated based on the contents of the previous frame).
It is therefore considered obvious that one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention would recognize the advantage of incorporating difficulty ratio value in the complexity calculation of Mori in order to adjust allocated bits between slices using low computation loads as suggested by Sato (Sato pars 145-147).
Mori further discloses a plurality of pre-allocated bit rates (Mori pars 92-110 particularly note par. 94 note various value ranges for output bit-rate R). It is noted that Mori does not disclose adjusting the pre-allocated bitrate in response to network conditions. However Su discloses, setting a target bit rate including re-evaluating a current network bandwidth according to an encoding request of the current video frame (Su Fig. 4 and pars 47-54 note step 41 identifying changes in network bandwidth that exceed a threshold), and dynamically determining a pre-allocated bitrate of the current video frame at a dynamic current network bandwidth based on the current network bandwidth as re-evaluated (Su Fig. 4 and pars 47-51 note identifying a pre-determined target bitrate based on the change in the network bandwidth) , wherein the pre-allocated bitrate is adaptively adjusted with real-time fluctuations of the current network bandwidth to match a transmission capacity of the current network (Su Fig. 4 pars 47-54 note gradually adjusting the bitrate and continuing to update the target bitrate based on changes in network bandwidth conditions).
It is therefore considered obvious that one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention would recognize the advantage of adjusting the output bitrate of Mori in view of Sato based on evaluations of network bandwidth conditions as taught by Su in order to avoid sudden changes in video quality as suggested by Su (Su par. 48).
In regard to claim 2 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 1. Mori further discloses that macroblock subsets comprise uncoded macroblock subsets (Mori par. 135 picture to be encoded includes both already coded and uncoded macroblocks), and predicting the precoding bit rate of the current macroblock subset in response to coding the current macroblock subset in the current video frame based on the actual coding weight of each macroblock subset of the current video frame in the previous video frame, and the actual coding bit rate of each coded macroblock subset in the current video frame comprises:
in response to determining that at least one coded macroblock subset is present in the current video frame, calculating the actual coding bit rate of each coded macroblock subset in the current video frame, and ratios of weights of the uncoded macroblock subsets to a weight of the at least one coded macroblock subset in the current video frame (Mori Fig. 12 and pars 146-164 particularly note par. 151 the target bitrate is calculated from the ratio of coded and uncoded macroblocks in the frame); and
acquiring the precoding bitrate of the current macroblock subset in response to coding the current macroblock subset in the current video frame by estimating coding bit rates of the uncoded macroblock subsets in the current video frame based on the actual coding bit rates and the ratios (Mori Fig. 12 and pars. 151-152 note obtaining precoding bitrate T based on the number of coded slices and the number of coded macroblocks within the current slice).
In regard to claim 5 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 1 above. Mori further discloses that upon acquiring the target coding quantization parameter of the current macroblock subset in the current video frame, the method further comprises:
coding macroblocks in the current macroblock subset in the sequence based on the target coding quantization parameter (Mori Fig. 13 note determining a q_scale value for each macroblock of a picture, further note Fig. 2 for coding macroblocks using the determined quantization parameters).
In regard to claim 6 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 5 above. Mori further discloses that upon coding the macroblocks in the current macroblock subset in sequence based on the target coding quantization parameter, the method further comprises:
in response to determining that the coding of each macroblock subset in the current video frame is completed, calculating an actual coding weight of each macroblock subset in the current frame, based on the actual coding bit rate of each macroblock subset in the current video frame and the actual coding bit rate of the current video frame (Mori Fig. 12 and par. 160 note determining a degree of difficulty, Ci in coding each slice after coding the slice).
In regard to claim 12 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 1 above. Mori further discloses that a to-be-coded video comprises a plurality of video frames, and prior to predicting the precoding bit rate of the current macroblock subset in response to coding the current macroblock subset in the current video frame, the method further comprises:
evaluating a current network bandwidth corresponding to each video frame in the to-be-coded video based on a coding request of the video frame (Mori par. 93-95 note reference quantization scale q_st is set according to an output bit rate, further note that the output bitrate R may vary between i.e. 4Mbps and 9 Mbps).
Claims 14-16 and 19-20 describe a computing device and non-transitory computer readable medium causing a processor to implement steps substantially identical to claims 1-2, and 5-6 above. Refer to the statements made in regard to claims 1-2 and 5-6 above for the rejection of claims 14-16 and 19-20 which will not be repeated here for brevity. Mori further discloses a processor and a memory (Mori Fig. 1 note coding processing unit 1 and buffer 3).
Claim(s) 3 and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mori in view of Sato and Su and in further view of Kim (6704363).
In regard to claims 3 and 17 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claims 2 and 17 above. Mori further discloses determining that a coded macroblock subset is not present in the current video frame (Mori pars. 208-218 note detected erroneous macroblocks). It is noted that Mori does not disclose details of determining quantization parameters for missing macroblock subsets.
However, Kim discloses a method of concealing errors in which missing macroblocks are replaced with macroblocks from a previous frame, and thus include the information of the previous frame including quantization parameters (Kim Fig. 1 and col. 2 lines 1-12 note temporal error concealment).
It is therefore considered obvious that one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention would recognize the advantage of incorporating temporal error concealment as taught by Kim in the invention of Mori, Sato and Su in order to gain the advantage of improved picture quality as suggested by Kim (Kim col. 1 lines 29-38).
Claim(s) 4 and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mori in view of Sato and Su and in further view of Suzuki et al (2017/0155902).
In regard to claims 4 and 18 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claims 1 and 14 above. Mori discloses acquiring the target coding quantization parameter of the current macroblock subset in the current video frame by adjusting the actual coding quantization parameter of the current macroblock subset in the previous video frame, based on the bit rate difference between the precoding bit rate and the pre-allocated bit rate of the current video frame at the current network bandwidth (Mori Figs 13-14 note determining a difference between an actual coding amount and a pre-allocated and precoding bitrates). Mori further discloses adjusting an actual coding quantization parameter based on the value of the difference (Mori Fig. 14). It is noted that Mori does not disclose details of a preset fluctuation range.
However, Suzuki discloses a method for adjusting a quantization parameter based on a difference in bitrates including:
in response to determining that the bit rate difference between a bit rate and a target bit rate is within a preset bit rate fluctuation range, determining the actual coding quantization parameter is unchanged from its starting value (Suzuki Fig 7 and pars 83-88 note par. 86 determining whether the actual code amount is within a threshold ε of the target code amount, and if so leaving the quantization parameter unchanged);
in response to determining that the bit rate difference between a bit rate and the target bit rate exceeds the preset bit rate fluctuation range, and that the bit rate is greater than the target bit rate, acquiring the target coding quantization parameter by raising the actual coding quantization parameter (Suzuki Fig. 7 and pars 83-88 note par 87 step S10 the when the code amount exceeds the target by more than a threshold the quantization parameter is increased); and
in response to determining that the bitrate difference between a bit rate and the target bit rate exceeds the present bit rate fluctuation range, and that the bit rate is less than the target bit rate, acquiring the target coding quantization parameter by reducing the actual coding quantization parameter (Suzuki Fig. 7 and pars 83-88 note par. 87 step S9 when the code amount is less than the target by more than a threshold the quantization parameter is decreased).
It is therefore considered obvious that one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention would recognize utilizing the quantization adjusting technique of Suzuki in place of the quantization adjustment of Mori, Sato and Su in order to gain the advantage of maintaining a code amount near to an ideal code amount as suggested by Suzuki (Suzuki Fig. 6 and par. 82).
Claim(s) 7-11 and 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Mori in view Sato and Su and in further view of El-Maleh et al (2007/0097257).
In regard to claims 7 and 21 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claims 1 and 14 above. Mori further discloses that prior to predicting the precoding bit rate of the current macroblock subset in response to coding the current macroblock subset in the current video frame, the method further comprises regulating a video buffer (Mori Fig. 7 and pars 113). Mori further discloses a lower coding rate limit (Mori pars 87-88 note stuffing bits used to guarantee a minimum number of bits per picture). It is noted that Mori does not disclose extensive details of buffer management.
However, EL-Maleh discloses video coding including:
estimating a video pre-buffer amount during video transmission at the current network bandwidth based on the pre-allocated bit rate of the current video frame at the current network bandwidth and lower coding rate limits of associated video frames (El Maleh par. 68 note determining a virtual buffer fullness Wn based on a target bitrate R and a minimum amount 0) and coding the current video frame in response to the video pre-buffer amount being within a preset coding threshold value (El Maleh pars 70-72 note determining quantization and target bit rate values based on whether or not the buffer fulness is less than a skipping threshold).
It is therefore considered obvious that one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention would recognize the advantage of incorporating buffer controls as taught by El-Maleh in the invention of Mori, Sato and Su in order to gain the advantage of minimizing buffer underflow and overflow as suggested by El-Maleh (El-Maleh par. 74)
In regard to claim 8 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 7 above. El-Maleh further discloses that estimating the video pre-buffer amount during video transmission at the current network bandwidth based on the pre-allocated bitrate of the current video frame at the current network bandwidth and the lower coding bit rate limits of the associated video frames comprises:
acquiring the pre-allocated bit rate of the current video frame and a transmission bit rate during video transmission at the current network bandwidth by adjusting the current network bandwidth based on an actual video buffer amount, a buffer capacity and a buffer vacancy factor in response to actually coding the previous video frame (El-Maleh Fig. 6 and pars 77-78 note estimating a new frame budget based on the target coding rate and buffer fulness values); and
acquiring the video pre-buffer amount during video transmission at the current network bandwidth by adjusting the actual video buffer amount based on a bit rate difference between the pre-allocated bit rate of the current video frame and the transmission bit rate and a bit rate difference between the lower coding bit rate limits of the associated video frames and the transmission bit rate (LE Maleh par. 68 note updating the buffer fullness based on a difference between the actual coded bits Bn-1 and the target output bitrate R/F).
In regard to claim 9 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 8 above. Mori further discloses that upon acquiring the video pre-buffer amount during video transmission at the current network bandwidth by adjusting the current network bandwidth based on the video buffer amount, the buffer capacity and the buffer vacancy factor in response to actually coding the previous video frame, the method further comprises:
in response to determining that the pre-allocated bit rate is less than a lower coding bit rate limit of the current video frame, updating the pre-allocated bit rate to the lower coding bit rate limit of the current frame (Mori pars 87-88 note inserting stuffing bits when the number of generated bits is less than a target amount).
In regard to claim 10 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 7 above. El-Maleh further discloses that upon estimating the video pre-buffer amount during video transmission at the current network bandwidth, the method further comprises:
in response to determining that the video pre-buffer amount exceeds the preset coding threshold value, discarding the current video frame (El-Maleh par. 70 note skipping a frame if the buffer fulness is above a threshold value).
In regard to claim 11 refer to the statements made in the rejection of claim 7 above. El-Male further discloses that upon acquiring the target coding quantization parameter of the current macroblock subset in the current video frame the method further comprises:
updating an actual video buffer amount corresponding to the current video frame based on an actual coding amount of the current video frame upon actual coding (El-Maleh par. 68 note updating the buffer fulness value based on the actual encoded bits Bn-1).
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JEREMIAH CHARLES HALLENBECK-HUBER whose telephone number is (571)272-5248. The examiner can normally be reached Monday to Friday from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.
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/JEREMIAH C HALLENBECK-HUBER/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2481