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 .
Priority
Acknowledgment is made of applicant’s claim for foreign priority under 35 U.S.C. 119 (a)-(d). The certified copy has been filed in parent Application No. CN 2022108130296, filed on July 11, 2022.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Claim Objections
Claims 1 and 18 are object to. The term “eth” should be
e
t
h
.
Status of Claims & Remarks
Amendments to claims 1 and 18 – 19 have been entered.
Claims 21 – 22 are newly added.
Claims 2 and 17 are canceled.
Claims 1, 3 – 16 and 18 – 22 are currently pending.
Due to amendments and remarks, claim interpretation and drawing objection withdrawn.
After further searching, a new reference is found.
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.
Claims 1, 3 – 4 and 6 – 16 and 18 – 22 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being obvious over Lao (EP 4148451 A1) filed May 05, 2020 in view of Lombardo (US 20220236375 A1).
As to claims 1 and 18 – 19, Lao discloses a signal processing method, applied to a radar, wherein the radar comprises M transmit channels, and the method comprises:
transmitting, during a first transmit cycle, a first detection signal through the M transmit channels; transmitting, during a second transmit cycle, a second detection signal through m1 transmit channels in the M transmit channels, wherein m1<M and M is an integer greater than 0 (Figs. 3 – 4 Tx0 and either one of Tx1 or Tx2); and
processing a first echo signal and a second echo signal to determine a correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels (Fig. 7 step 703 and Fi. 8 “Accumulate” and step 803);
wherein the first echo signal and the second echo signal are signals generated after the first detection signal and the second detection signal are reflected by a target, respectively (Fig. 1 b “Receive antenna” and Fig. 7 step 701).
Lao does not teach transmitting the first detection signal with pulses phase-stepped by (e-1)*through an eth transmit channel in the M transmit channels, wherein e{1,2,3,...,M}.
In the same field of endeavor, Lombardo “In order to increase the accuracy and to reduce the influence of noise, a plurality of samples m[k] are used for a measurement, in which case a different phase shift Δϕ.sub.M[k] can be set for each sample m[k]. In one example implementation, N samples m[k] are determined, wherein N is a power of two (e.g. N=2.sup.p where p is a positive integer) and wherein for associated phase shifts Δϕ.sub.M[k]=2kπ/N rad it holds true that (k=0, . . . , N−1). For the case N=8, for the sequence of phase shifts {0, π/4, π/2, 3π/4, π, 5π/4, 3π/2, 7π/4}, a corresponding sequence of samples m[k] (where k=0, . . . 7) is determined (Para. 39).”
In view of the teachings of Lombardo, it would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before filing to include the sequence of phase shifts as taught, which are the same as provided by claimed invention, in order to reduce the influence of noise thereby improving accuracy.
As to claims 3 and 21, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the processing method according to claim 1 and 18, wherein processing the first echo signal and the second echo signal to determine the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels comprises: performing a first processing on the first echo signal to obtain a first target data; performing a second processing on the second echo signal to obtain a second target data; performing a matching processing on the first target data and the second target data, and determining the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels based on a matching result (Fig. 9 step 806).
As to claim 4, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 3, wherein the first target data comprises target point data TAMTi and the second target data comprises target point data TAm1Tj, wherein i∊{1,...,IAMT}, j∊{1,...,JAm1T}, and both IAMT and JAm1T are positive integers; performing the matching processing on the first target data and the second target data comprises: searching for a respective one of the target point data TAMTi corresponding to each of the target point data TAm1Tj among IAMT of the target point data TAMTi, respectively (Figs. 8 – 9 matches the Range-Doppler maps which have integer indices.).
As to claim 6, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 4, wherein after searching for the respective one of the target point data TAMTi corresponding to each of the target point data TAm1Tj among IAMT of the target point data TAMTi respectively, determining the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels based on the matching result, comprises: determining, based on a correspondence between the target point data TAMTi and the target point data TAm1Tj, a transmit channel corresponding to the m1 transmit channels in the M transmit channels; and determining, based on the transmit channel corresponding to the m1 transmit channels in the M transmit channels, the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels (Figs. 8 – 9 as previously cited and Page 7 code division see also Page 29 “correct location of Tx0 may be determined …”).
As to claims 7 and 22, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 6 and 18, wherein the method further comprises: after determining the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels based on the matching result, correcting the first target data according to the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels to obtain a third target data (Page 22 “transmit/receive channel calibration” and Page 26 “phase compensation”).
As to claim 8, Lao disclose the signal processing method according to claim 7, wherein m1 is equal to 1 and the m1 transmit channels for transmitting the second detection signal comprise a first transmit channel; determining, based on the correspondence between the target point data TAMTi and the target point data TAm1Tj, the transmit channel corresponding to the m1 transmit channel in the M transmit channels, comprises: determining, based on the correspondence between the target point data TAMTi and the target point dataTAm1Tj, a second transmit channel corresponding to the first transmit channel in the M transmit channels; and correcting the first target data according to the correspondence between the first echo signal and the M transmit channels to obtain the third target data, comprises: correcting the first target data according to a position of the second transmit channel in the M transmit channels to obtain the third target data (In addition to Figs. 8 – 9 see Page 2 “Doppler Division MIMO With Velocity Resolving Capabilites” and Page 2 “range resolution” and “angle resolution”. The number of targets detected is based on detection probability, e.g. signal-to-noise threshold, and resolution requirements and the locations of said targets wherein the location of targets is not controlled by Applicant.).
As to claim 9, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 7, wherein the radar comprises L physical receive channels; the method further comprises: performing a channel separation on the third target data to obtain target data corresponding to M*L virtual receive channels (Page 27 “virtual”); and performing an angle measurement on the target based on the target data corresponding to the M*L virtual receive channels (Page 27 “beamforming”).
As to claim 10, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 9, wherein performing the angle measurement on the target comprises: performing the angle measurement on the target by means of a Digital Beam Forming (DBF) algorithm or a Deterministic Maximum Likelihood (DML) algorithm (Page 27 DBF).
As to claim 11, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 3, wherein performing the first processing on the first echo signal to obtain the first target data comprises: performing a channel separation on the first echo signal and obtaining the first target data based on a channel separation result (Page 2 “transmit antennas need to be separated to obtain angle …” and Page 23 “a Doppler index corresponding to the antenna Tx0 in the sub-RD map is determined.” And Page 25 “it can be learned that a location of a spectral line of Tx0 in the sub-RD map is a Doppler index …”).
As to claim 12, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 3, wherein the first processing and/or the second processing comprises a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector (Page 22).
As to claim 13, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 12, wherein one or both of the first processing and the second processing comprises at least one of the following processing: an analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), a 1D-discrete Fourier transform (1D-FFT), a 2D-discrete Fourier transform (2D-FFT) and a non-coherent integration (NCI) (Page 22 Step 804a).
As to claim 14, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 3, wherein the first detection signal or the second detection signal is a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) signal (Page 2 “chirp”).
As to claim 15, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 14, wherein the first detection signal is a time-division-multiplexing (TDM) signal and the second detection signal is a Doppler-division-multiplexing (DDM) signal (Page 14 makes clear both TDM and DDM are being implemented.).
As to claim 16, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing method according to claim 1, wherein the method further comprises: performing a velocity ambiguity resolution alternately based on the first echo signal and the second echo signal (Page 27 discusses switching between slots and comparing sub-RD diagram in different slots).
As to claim 17, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches the signal processing device, configured to implement the signal processing method according to claim 1 (Fig. 2).
As to claim 20, Lao in view of Lombardo teaches a terminal, comprising the radar as claimed in claim 18 (Fig. 2 item 200 which is a vehicle which is one of the examples provided for by the specification at Para. 28).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 5 is objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
The prior art of record does not teach all of the features of claim 5.
Conclusion
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/MICHAEL W JUSTICE/Examiner, Art Unit 3648