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 .
Notice to Applicants
This action is in response to the Request for Continued Examination filed on 03/25/2026.
Claims 1-4, 6-11, 13-18, 20-25, and 27-28 are pending.
Corrective Actions by Applicant
Claims 1, 8, 15, and 22 have been amended.
Request for Continued Examination
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and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114.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 03/11/2026 has been entered.
Response to Arguments
The examiner has fully considered Applicant’s presented arguments.
On page 7 of the remarks, Applicant argues that the amendments to independent claims 1, 8, 15, and 22 overcome the 35 U.S.C. 103 rejections of all claims. This is persuasive, particularly in view of the interview on 03/10/2026. However, the claim amendments necessitate new 103 rejections below.
Claim Rejections – 35 USC § 103
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.
Claims 1-3, 6-10, 13-17, 20-24, and 27-28 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Sun et al. (U.S. Publ. US-2018/0293737-A1) in view of Lin et al. (U.S. Publ. US-2022/0398747-A1) and Teed et al. ("RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow", 25 August 2020).
Regarding claim 1, Sun discloses a processor-implemented method (see figure 2A), performed by at least one processor (see paragraph 0019), the processor-implemented method comprising:
processing, by the at least one processor, a single level cost volume across a plurality of processing stages (first see figure 2A as a whole, where partial cost volumes are generated at a plurality of stages/iterations until step 230 ends the process; then see figure 2A, steps 110 and 210, as well as paragraph 0045, where a pyramidal set of features is generated for a first/source and second/target image; finally see figure 2A, step 220 and paragraph 0046, where a single cost volume is generated by comparing the features at the ith level of each feature pyramid)
by varying a receptive field of cost volume processing across each of the plurality of processing stages (see figure 1C, first/second feature pyramids; paragraphs 0020 and 0023 specify that each level of the pyramid represents the image features at different resolutions, thus each iteration of cost volume has a different receptive field according to the current pyramid level);
and performing, by the at least one processor, a learning-based correspondence estimation task related to the input image based on the processing, the learning-based correspondence estimation task comprising optical flow estimation, stereo estimation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), or multi-view stereo (see figure 2A, step 225 and paragraph 0046, where an optical flow estimate is produced using each iteration of cost volume).
Sun fails to disclose the single level cost volume having a resolution determined based on an average pooling of feature maps for an input image.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Lin discloses the single level cost volume having a resolution determined based on an average pooling of feature maps for an input image (see figure 10, Pooling Hidden Layer 1022b and paragraph 0144, where various forms of pooling functions can be applied to the input image feature maps, such as average pooling, which affects the final resolution of the cost volume).
Sun and Lin are considered analogous art, as they are both directed to efficient cost volume calculation. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have integrated the teachings of Lin into Sun because pooling layers simplify output information from convolutional layers (see Lin paragraph 0144).
Sun in view of Lin fails to further disclose the processing comprising computing the single level cost volume in a sliding window manner over local neighborhoods to construct cost volume values on-demand for each processing stage.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Teed discloses the processing comprising computing the single level cost volume in a sliding window manner over local neighborhoods (see pages 6-7, Section 3.2, paragraphs under “Correlation Lookup”, where correlation volume values are computed over a local neighborhood for each pixel) to construct cost volume values on-demand for each processing stage (see pages 6-7, Section 3.2, paragraphs under "Efficient Computation for High Resolution Images", where each correlation value can be computed on-demand, or in other words, only when it is looked up).
Sun and Teed are considered analogous art, as they are both directed to efficient cost volume calculation. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have integrated the teachings of Teed into Sun and Lin because doing so improves time complexity of the correlation volume computation (see Teed Pages 6-7, Section 3.2, paragraphs under "Efficient Computation for High Resolution Images").
Regarding claim 2, Sun discloses the varying comprises processing a different resolution of the single level cost volume at each of the plurality of processing stages (see figure 1c, first/second feature pyramids; paragraphs 0020 and 0023 specify that each level of the pyramid represents the image features at different resolutions, thus each iteration of cost volume has a different receptive field according to the current pyramid level)
Sun in view of Teed fails to disclose while maintaining a same neighborhood sampling radius. More specifically, Sun paragraphs 0023, 0030, and 0037 specify that a limited range/neighborhood sampling radius is used, but not specifically that it can be fixed across iterations.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Lin discloses while maintaining a same neighborhood sampling radius (see paragraph 0047, where flow search areas of the target frame can be set to a constant size).
Sun and Lin are considered analogous art, as they are both directed to efficient cost volume calculation. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have integrated the teachings of Lin into Sun and Teed because doing so reduces computational complexity of cost volume calculations (see Lin paragraph 0047).
Regarding claim 3, Sun in view of Lin discloses the resolution increases from a first processing stage to a later processing stage (see Sun figure 2A, steps 230, 235, and 240, where at the end of each iteration, the optical flow estimate is upsampled and the current pyramid level “l” is decremented by 1; paragraph 0020 specifies that higher pyramid levels are of lower resolution, thus decrementing l means a higher-resolution level will be processed in the next iteration).
Regarding claim 6, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses one level cost volume is processed in each of the plurality of processing stages (see Sun figure 2A, step 220 and paragraph 0046, where only one partial cost volume is generated in each iteration).
Regarding claim 7, Sun in view of Lin discloses sampling a subset of pixels in the receptive field (see Sun figure 1B and paragraphs 0023, 0030, and 0037, which specify that a limited range/neighborhood sampling radius is maintained across iterations that is lower than the resolution of the image, thus a subset of the image is sampled to create a partial cost volume), the learning-based correspondence estimation task being computed based on the subset of pixels (Sun figure 2A, step 225 specifies that the partial cost volume is used for the optical flow estimate).
Regarding claim 8, Sun discloses an apparatus (see figure 5C and paragraph 0118), comprising: at least one memory (see figure 5C, main memory 540); and at least one processor coupled to the at least one memory (see figure 5C, CPU 530).
The remainder of claim 8 recites that the at least one processor is configured to perform steps identical to those of claim 1. Therefore, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 8 as applied to claim 1 above.
Regarding claim 9, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 9 as applied to claim 2 above.
Regarding claim 10, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 10 as applied to claim 3 above.
Regarding claim 13, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 13 as applied to claim 6 above.
Regarding claim 14, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 14 as applied to claim 7 above.
Regarding claim 15, Sun discloses a non-transitory computer-readable medium having program code recorded thereon (see claim 20 and paragraph 0123), the program code executed by a processor (see figure 5C, CPU 530).
The remainder of claim 15 recites that the program code performs steps identical to those of claim 1. Therefore, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 15 as applied to claim 1 above.
Regarding claim 16, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 16 as applied to claim 2 above.
Regarding claim 17, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 17 as applied to claim 3 above.
Regarding claim 20, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 20 as applied to claim 6 above.
Regarding claim 21, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 21 as applied to claim 7 above.
Regarding claim 22, Sun discloses an apparatus (see figure 5C).
The remainder of claim 22 recites means for performing steps identical to those of claim 1. Therefore, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 22 as applied to claim 1 above.
Regarding claim 23, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 23 as applied to claim 2 above.
Regarding claim 24, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 24 as applied to claim 3 above.
Regarding claim 27, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 27 as applied to claim 6 above.
Regarding claim 28, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses claim 28 as applied to claim 7 above.
Claims 4, 11, 18, and 25 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Sun et al. (U.S. Publ. US-2018/0293737-A1) in view of Lin et al. (U.S. Publ. US-2022/0398747-A1) and Teed et al. ("RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow", 25 August 2020), and further in view of Baik (U.S. Publ. US-2016/0014387-A1).
Regarding claim 4, Sun in view of Lin and Teed discloses the varying comprises varying a neighborhood sampling radius at each of the plurality of processing stages (see Sun paragraph 0037, where the limited range/neighborhood sampling radius "d" varies at each level)
Sun in view of Lin and Teed fails to disclose while maintaining a same resolution.
Pertaining to the same field of endeavor, Baik discloses while maintaining a same resolution (see paragraph 0032, where cost volumes are maintained at a constant size/resolution).
Sun and Baik are considered analogous art, as they are both directed to efficient cost volume calculation. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have integrated the teachings of Baik into Sun, Lin, and Teed because doing so increases either search range or precision without increasing algorithm complexity (see Baik paragraphs 0050-0052).
Regarding claim 11, Sun in view of Lin, Teed, and Baik discloses claim 11 as applied to claim 4 above.
Regarding claim 18, Sun in view of Lin, Teed, and Baik discloses claim 18 as applied to claim 4 above.
Regarding claim 25, Sun in view of Lin, Teed, and Baik discloses claim 25 as applied to claim 4 above.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NICHOLAS JOHN HELCO whose telephone number is (703)756-5539. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday-Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Matthew Bella, can be reached at telephone number 571-272-7778. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/NICHOLAS JOHN HELCO/Examiner, Art Unit 2667
/MATTHEW C BELLA/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2667