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 .
Claim Objections
Claims 1 and 3 are objected to because of the following informalities:
Claim 1 has reference numbers for system (100) and image (101). Remove the reference numbers.
Claim 3 has reference number for SIMD instruction (101). Remove the reference number.
Appropriate correction is required.
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 – 3 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.
Claim 1 is rendered indefinite for the following reasons:
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential elements, such omission amounting to a gap between the elements. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted elements are: “textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness detected and extracted”. It is unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art as to from what part are these textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness are detected and extracted. The limitation is simply a statement without any details of the active step.
step c recites the limitation, “software is turned off in the software module”. “Saturation is turned off” appears to be an operating condition and not a characteristic of the system itself. It is further unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art how this feature impacts the detection and extraction step.
step d recites the limitation “the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions”. It is unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art as to how this feature impacts the detection and extraction as no further details are recited.
recites the limitation “the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU” in step d. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim as there is no prior definition for “Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)” in the claim.
recites the limitation “the critical instructions” in step d. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim as there is no prior definition for “critical instructions” in the claim and it is unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art what is critical in the context of SIMD instructions.
Claim 2 recites the limitation “the BoM cost” and there is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. Additional it is unclear and confusing how the BoM cost of platform SoC or a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) core is related to the system of claim 1.
Claim 3 is rendered indefinite for the following reasons:
Claim 3 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential elements, such omission amounting to a gap between the elements. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted elements are: “textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness detected and extracted”. It is unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art as to from what part are these textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness are detected and extracted. The limitation is simply a statement without any details of the active step.
step c recites the limitation, “software is turned off in the software module”. “Saturation is turned off” appears to be an operating condition and not a characteristic of the system itself. It is further unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art how this feature impacts the detection and extraction step.
step d recites the limitation “the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions”. It is unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art as to how this feature impacts the detection and extraction as no further details are recited.
recites the limitation “the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU” in step d. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim as there is no prior definition for “Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)” in the claim.
recites the limitation “the critical instructions” in step d. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim as there is no prior definition for “critical instructions” in the claim and it is unclear and confusing to one of the ordinary skill in the art what is critical in the context of SIMD instructions.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
The text of those sections of Title 35, U.S. Code not included in this action can be found in a prior Office action.
Claim 1 and 3 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because: the claims are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim(s) does/do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the claim is directed to towards a system and method that includes executing software code for extraction of tropological features from an image, which broadly encompasses a computer program per se. Such computer programs, per se, are not, in and of themselves, methods or machines, nor are they physical products of manufacture or compositions of matter. Therefore, such programs do not fall into any of the categories of eligible subject matter defined in 35 U.S.C. § 101 and are not, by themselves, eligible for patent protection. Such programs can be eligible for patent protection if claimed as embodied on or in a computer readable storage device or medium, but only if the claim clearly and unambiguously excludes transitory, propagating signals from the full scope of the claimed subject matter, as such signals are also not eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. It is suggested that amending the claim language to define the computer program product as having the code instructions embodied on a "non-transitory computer-readable medium" would satisfy these requirements and would limit the claimed invention to eligible subject matter.
Claim 2 is objected to for being dependent on rejected base claim 1.
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.
The text of those sections of Title 35, U.S. Code not included in this action can be found in a prior Office action.
Claims 1 - 3 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Moed et al. (US 20100200660 A1; hereafter referred to Moed) in view of Qi et al. (Qi, Ming, Guangzhong Sun, and Guoliang Chen. "Parallel and simd optimization of image feature extraction." Procedia Computer Science 4 (2011): 489-498”) further in view of Morton (US 20020116595 A1; hereafter referred to as Morton).
Regarding Claim 1, Moed teaches:
A system (100) for extraction of Tropological feature from an image ([0013] “a system and method for capturing, detecting and extracting features of a symbology or ID, such as a 1D barcode, that employs an efficient processing system based upon a vision system on a chip (VSoC) architecture”), the system (100) comprising:
a. a single Central Processing Unit (CPU) core with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions for executing software code for extraction of Tropological feature from an image (101) ([0013] “providing a system and method for capturing, detecting and extracting features of a symbology or ID, such as a 1D barcode, that employs an efficient processing system based upon a vision system on a chip (VSoC) architecture. Under the control of a CPU (also termed a "general purpose processor" herein), the VSoC illustratively provides a linear array processor (LAP) that is constructed with a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture in which each pixel of the rows of the pixel array are directed to individual processors in a similarly wide array that defines the LAP”; see [0016]);
However, Moed fails to explicitly teach:
b. textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness detected and extracted;
c. saturation is turned off in the software modules; and
d. the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions.
In the same field of endeavor, Qi teaches:
b. textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness detected and extracted (Qi, Section 3.1 “The main idea of thread-level parallel is coarse-grained thread parallelism, that is, each working CPU thread deals with one image’s feature extraction…. when the image size is larger but with small amount of images to deal with, there are two possible strategies: one is to scale the image within a normal range (typically 600 × 500 pixels), which will lose some details of the image; another scheme is to do a fine-grained thread-level parallelization, which could have a fast response as well as a complete image feature information”);
Moed and Qi are considered analogous art as they are reasonably pertinent to the same field of endeavor of feature extraction. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of the ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Moed with the method of extracting textural features as taught my Qi to make the invention that extracts and detects the textural features of coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness. Doing so can result in optimization on multi-core systems and yield cumulative performance speedup (Qi, abstract); thus one of the ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the references.
However, Moed in view of Qi fails to explicitly teach:
c. saturation is turned off in the software modules; and
d. the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions.
However, in the same field of endeavor, Morton teaches:
c. saturation is turned off in the software modules (Morton, [0176] “The scalar processor 5 ALU does not have saturation logic”); and
d. the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions (Morton, [0079] “The DSP Chip 1 includes the four, 16-bit Vector Processors 6A. Collectively, they form the Parallel Arithmetic Unit 6. … Each Vector Processor 6A includes: ALU”; Morton, [0070] “the DSP Chip 1 is a versatile, fully programmable building block for real-time digital signal processing applications. It is specially designed for real-time video processing, although it can be applied to a number of other important applications, such as pattern recognition. It has an enhanced, single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) architecture”; Morton, [0167] The scalar processor 5 has a 16-function Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), supporting common arithmetic and Boolean operations… the ALU can operate on only one data type, … ALU does not have saturation logic”; Morton, [0104] “the accumulator can be used by the multiply-add and multiply-subtract logic”; Morton, [0177] “the barrel shifter, the scalar processor 5 has dedicated shift and rotate logic for single and double precision operands. The shift and rotate logic takes its input from the ALU”).
Moed, Qi and Morton are considered analogous art as they are reasonably pertinent to the same field of endeavor of feature extraction. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of the ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Moed in view of Qi with the method of having SIMD instructions as taught by Morton to make the invention that has ALU of the CPU designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions. Doing so can result improved programming of the DSP (Morton, [0004]); thus one of the ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the references.
Regarding Claim 2, Moed in view of Qi further in view of Morton teaches the system of claim 1, wherein the BoM cost of platform SoC is reduced compared to using a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) core to implement software modules (Qi, page 497, section 4.2 “using CPU with shared memory, higher cost effectiveness was achieved”; Morton,” The use of SDRAMs reduces system costs by utilizing inexpensive DRAM technology rather than expensive fast SRAM technology. Hence, a large main memory is cost effective using SDRAMs”; The Examiner notes that the cost is based on many other variables other than simply the processor type and therefore, the claim does not distinctly claim the subject matter).
Regarding Claim 3, Moed teaches:
A method for extraction of Tropological feature from an image ([0013] “a system and method for capturing, detecting and extracting features of a symbology or ID, such as a 1D barcode, that employs an efficient processing system based upon a vision system on a chip (VSoC) architecture”), the system (100) comprising:
a. a single Central Processing Unit (CPU) core with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions for executing software code for extraction of Tropological feature from an image (101) ([0013] “providing a system and method for capturing, detecting and extracting features of a symbology or ID, such as a 1D barcode, that employs an efficient processing system based upon a vision system on a chip (VSoC) architecture. Under the control of a CPU (also termed a "general purpose processor" herein), the VSoC illustratively provides a linear array processor (LAP) that is constructed with a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture in which each pixel of the rows of the pixel array are directed to individual processors in a similarly wide array that defines the LAP”; see [0016]);
However, Moed fails to explicitly teach:
b. textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness detected and extracted;
c. saturation is turned off in the software modules; and
d. the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions.
In the same field of endeavor, Qi teaches:
b. textural features coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness detected and extracted (Qi, Section 3.1 “The main idea of thread-level parallel is coarse-grained thread parallelism, that is, each working CPU thread deals with one image’s feature extraction…. when the image size is larger but with small amount of images to deal with, there are two possible strategies: one is to scale the image within a normal range (typically 600 × 500 pixels), which will lose some details of the image; another scheme is to do a fine-grained thread-level parallelization, which could have a fast response as well as a complete image feature information”);
Moed and Qi are considered analogous art as they are reasonably pertinent to the same field of endeavor of feature extraction. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of the ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Moed with the method of extracting textural features as taught by Qi to make the invention that extracts and detects the textural features of coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity, roughness. Doing so can result in optimization on multi-core systems and yield cumulative performance speedup (Qi, abstract); thus, one of the ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the references.
However, Moed in view of Qi fails to explicitly teach:
c. saturation is turned off in the software modules; and
d. the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions.
However, in the same field of endeavor, Morton teaches:
c. saturation is turned off in the software modules (Morton, [0176] “The scalar processor 5 ALU does not have saturation logic”); and
d. the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) of CPU is designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions, wherein the critical instruction include Multiply and Accumulate (MAC) and shift instructions (Morton, [0079] “The DSP Chip 1 includes the four, 16-bit Vector Processors 6A. Collectively, they form the Parallel Arithmetic Unit 6. … Each Vector Processor 6A includes: ALU”; Morton, [0070] “the DSP Chip 1 is a versatile, fully programmable building block for real-time digital signal processing applications. It is specially designed for real-time video processing, although it can be applied to a number of other important applications, such as pattern recognition. It has an enhanced, single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) architecture”; Morton, [0167] The scalar processor 5 has a 16-function Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), supporting common arithmetic and Boolean operations… the ALU can operate on only one data type, … ALU does not have saturation logic”; Morton, [0104] “the accumulator can be used by the multiply-add and multiply-subtract logic”; Morton, [0177] “the barrel shifter, the scalar processor 5 has dedicated shift and rotate logic for single and double precision operands. The shift and rotate logic takes its input from the ALU”).
Moed, Qi and Morton are considered analogous art as they are reasonably pertinent to the same field of endeavor of feature extraction. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of the ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Moed in view of Qi with the method of having SIMD instructions as taught by Morton to make the invention that has ALU of the CPU designed to have SIMD instructions without saturation logic in the critical instructions. Doing so can result improved programming of the DSP (Morton, [0004]); thus one of the ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the references.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
US 20240094269 A1 SENSOR MEASUREMENT CORRECTION BASED ON EMPIRICAL DAT
US 20020181775 A1 Pattern Recognition Apparatus Using Parallel Operation
US 6078940 A Microprocessor With An Instruction For Multiply And Left Shift With Saturate
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VAISALI RAO. KOPPOLU
Examiner
Art Unit 2664
/JENNIFER MEHMOOD/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2664