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 .
Examiner’s Notes
The 9-16 are non-transitory as explained in paragraph 40 of PGPUB.
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.
Claims 1–20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
In January, 2019 (updated October 2019), the USPTO released new examination guidelines setting forth a two-step inquiry for determining whether a claim is directed to non-statutory subject matter. According to the guidelines, a claim is directed to non-statutory subject matter if:
STEP 1: the claim does not fall within one of the four statutory categories of invention (process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter), or
STEP 2: the claim recites a judicial exception, e.g., an abstract idea, without reciting additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception, as determined using the following analysis:
STEP 2A (PRONG 1): Does the claim recite an abstract idea, law of nature, or natural phenomenon?
STEP 2A (PRONG 2): Does the claim recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application?
STEP 2B: Does the claim recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception?
Using the two-step inquiry, it is clear that the claims are directed toward non-statutory subject matter, as shown below:
STEP 1: Do the claims fall within one of the statutory categories? Yes. All claims fall within a statutory category under § 101.
The claims are directed to a Method (Claim 1), a Computer Program Product (Claim 9), and a System (Claim 17). While these fall within the four statutory categories of 35 U.S.C. § 101, they are further analyzed to determine if they recite a judicial exception.
STEP 2A (PRONG 1): Is the claim directed to a law of nature, a natural phenomenon or an abstract idea? Yes, the claims are directed to an abstract idea.
With regard to STEP 2A (PRONG 1), the guidelines provide three groupings of subject matter that are considered abstract ideas:
Mathematical concepts – mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations;
Certain methods of organizing human activity – fundamental economic principles or practices (including hedging, insurance, mitigating risk); commercial or legal interactions (including agreements in the form of contracts; legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors; business relations); managing personal behavior or relationships or interactions between people (including social activities, teaching, and following rules or instructions); and
Mental processes – concepts that are practicably performed in the human mind (including an observation, evaluation, judgment, opinion).
The claims recite an abstract idea because they involve Mathematical Concepts and Certain Mental Processes.
Mathematical Concepts: The claims recite "extracting feature maps," "measuring a self-attention," and utilizing a "softmax function" (Claim 7). These are mathematical algorithms and relationships expressed as a series of computational steps.
Mental Processes: The core concept of "detecting false negative objects" by comparing a list of "positive" versus "negative" candidates is a process that can be performed in the human mind or with aid of pen and paper.
The claim enumerates these abstract ideas by reciting the mathematical manipulation of image data to reach a predictive conclusion. Therefore, the claim recites an abstract idea.
These limitations, under their broadest reasonable interpretation, cover applying mathematical algorithms and/or calculations. The use of a computer or processing device include no more than applying the exception using a generic computer or computer component. The limitations are not directed to an improvement in the computer itself or a computer component and therefore cannot provide an inventive concept.
To distinguish ineligible claims that merely recite a judicial exception from eligible claims that require an implementation of judicial exception, the Supreme Court uses a two-step framework: Step One (Step 2A), determine whether the claims at issue are directed to one of those patent-ineligible concepts; and Step Two (Step 2B), if so, ask “what else is there in the claims?’ to determine whether the additional elements transform the nature of the claim into a patent eligible application.
STEP 2A (PRONG 2): Does the claim recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application? No, the claim does not recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application.
With regard to STEP 2A (prong 2), whether the claim recites additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application, the guidelines provide the following exemplary considerations that are indicative that an additional element (or combination of elements) may have integrated the judicial exception into a practical application:
an additional element reflects an improvement in the functioning of a computer, or an improvement to other technology or technical field;
an additional element that applies or uses a judicial exception to effect a particular treatment or prophylaxis for a disease or medical condition;
an additional element implements a judicial exception with, or uses a judicial exception in conjunction with, a particular machine or manufacture that is integral to the claim;
an additional element effects a transformation or reduction of a particular article to a different state or thing; and
an additional element applies or uses the judicial exception in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological environment, such that the claim as a whole is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the exception.
While the guidelines further state that the exemplary considerations are not an exhaustive list and that there may be other examples of integrating the exception into a practical application, the guidelines also list examples in which a judicial exception has not been integrated into a practical application:
an additional element merely recites the words “apply it” (or an equivalent) with the judicial exception, or merely includes instructions to implement an abstract idea on a computer, or merely uses a computer as a tool to perform an abstract idea;
an additional element adds insignificant extra-solution activity to the judicial exception; and
an additional element does no more than generally link the use of a judicial exception to a particular technological environment or field of use.
The identified abstract idea is not integrated into a practical application because the claims do not result in an improvement to the functioning of a computer or to another technology or technical field.
No Technical Improvement: The specification and claims do not explain how the computer is improved; rather, they describe the computer as a tool to perform a new mathematical method. The "backbone of a neural network" and "regional proposal network" are recited at a high level of generality and perform their ordinary functions.
General Purpose Computer: The elements simply use the computer as a "black box" to process data. There is no recitation of a specific improvement in image processing speed, memory efficiency, or hardware-level optimization.
Accordingly, none of the claims integrate the abstract idea into a practical application.
STEP 2B: Does the claim recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception? No, the claim does not recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With regard to STEP 2B, whether the claims recite additional elements that provide significantly more than the recited judicial exception, the guidelines specify that the pre-guideline procedure is still in effect. Specifically, that examiners should continue to consider whether an additional element or combination of elements:
adds a specific limitation or combination of limitations that are not well-understood, routine, conventional activity in the field, which is indicative that an inventive concept may be present; or
simply appends well-understood, routine, conventional activities previously known to the industry, specified at a high level of generality, to the judicial exception, which is indicative that an inventive concept may not be present.
The following computer functions have been recognized as well‐understood, routine, and conventional functions when they are claimed in a merely generic manner (e.g., at a high level of generality): receiving or transmitting data over a network. See MPEP 2106.05(d)(II).
Elements like "feature maps," "RPNs," and "self-attention" were well-known and conventional in the art at the time of the invention. Generic Components: The system (Claim 17) uses a generic "processor" and "memory."
Conventional Combination: The combination of these elements—using self-attention to refine a list of proposals—does not add "significantly more" than the abstract idea itself. It merely instructs one to "apply" the abstract idea of self-attention within the conventional framework of an RPN.
Dependent Claims 2–5 and 8 (relating to the specific four-convolution layer sequence and "soft labels") are also rejected. These claims merely provide a narrower description of the mathematical steps and do not add a technical transformation or an unconventional step that provides an inventive concept.
Accordingly, the claims do not recite any additional elements sufficient to amount to “significantly more” than the abstract idea itself. See Berkheimer v. HP Inc., 881 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2018); SAP America, Inc. v. InvestPic, LLC, 898 F.3d 1161 (Fed. Cir. 2018).
Accordingly, claims 1–24 are ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
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.
Claim(s) 1-24 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ren (“Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks) in view of Hu (Relation Networks for Object Detection) in further view of Yang (Introspective False Negative Prediction for Black-Box Object Detectors in Autonomous Driving).
Regarding claim 1, Ren teaches a computer-implemented method for automatically detecting false negative objects, the method comprising: receiving an input image (see section 3);
extracting feature maps of said input image using a backbone of a neural network (see section 3, common set of conv layers and conv feature map);
outputting a list of object proposals by a regional proposal network using said extracted feature maps (see section 3, figure 3, RPN outputs a set of rectangles); and
predicting false negative proposals from said list of object proposals (section 3, objectness score).
Hu teaches measuring a self-attention between positive proposals and negative proposals from said list of object proposals (see section 3, object relation module, dot product between query and all keys to obtain similarity and see equation 2 in section 3 which does both positive and negative).
It would have been obvious prior to the effective filing date of the invention to one of ordinary skill in the art to include in Ren the ability to the measure he similarity as taught by Hu. The reason is to quantify object relationships.
Regarding claim 2, Ren teaches using a first convolution layer to create a first feature map used to estimate anchor data values of each anchor by passing to a second convolution layer (see section 3, conv layer creates feature map).
Regarding claim 3, Ren teaches creating embedding features using said first feature map for each anchor using a third convolution layer (see section 3, sibling 1x1 conv layers).
Regarding claim 4, Ren teaches estimating a probability of every anchor belonging to a foreground or a background as a second feature map using an output of said third convolution layer by a fourth convolution layer (see section 3, object classes vs background. This outputs per anchor object/background probabilities).
Regarding claim 5, Ren teaches generating said list of object proposals using said second feature map (see section 4, proposal filtering, top N ranked proposal regions).
Regarding claim 6, Hu teaches wherein said self-attention between said positive and said negative proposals is measured using an attention map (see the rejection of claim 1, equations 1 and 2).
Regarding claim 7, equation 1 of Hu teaches softmax.
Regarding claim 8, see the rejection of claim 1, discussion on equation 2, positive and negative.
Regarding claims 9-24, see the rejection of claims 1-8 above.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HADI AKHAVANNIK whose telephone number is (571)272-8622. The examiner can normally be reached 9 AM - 5 PM Monday to Friday.
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/HADI AKHAVANNIK/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2676