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
Claim 7 is objected to because of the following informalities:
“the input depth date”, should be corrected to “the input depth data”
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1, 6, and 9-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being unpatentable by Tallón (M. Tallón, S. Derin Babacan, J. Mateos, M. N. Do, R. Molina and A. K. Katsaggelos, "Upsampling and denoising of depth maps via joint-segmentation," 2012 Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Bucharest, Romania, 2012, pp. 245-249).
Regarding Claim 1, representative of Claim 9 and 10, Tallón teaches an information processing apparatus comprising:
at least one processor and/or circuit configured to function as following units:
a division processing unit configured to divide each of input depth data and image data corresponding to the input depth data and having a higher resolution than the input depth data into a plurality of divided regions ([abstract]: we present a novel method for obtaining a high resolution depth map from a pair of a low resolution depth map and a corresponding high resolution color image, [Section 2, paragraph 1]: Let us denote by Y the HR color image and by XL the low resolution depth map up-sampled to the size of Y…proposed algorithm is summarized as follows. Both input images are divided into overlapping patches);
an inference processing unit configured to infer depth data by complementing input depth data with image data for each of the divided regions ([Section 2, paragraph 1]: a joint segmentation is performed on the color and depth patches, denoted by Yp and XpL and a single depth value is assigned to each region of Yp); and
a combining processing unit configured to combine depth data having a higher resolution than that of input depth data by combining inferred depth data in the divided regions ([Section 2, paragraph 1]: a single depth value is assigned to each region of Yp…once all the patches are processed, they are merged together to form the final HR depth map),
wherein the division processing unit performs division such that each divided region has an overlap region partially overlapping with an adjacent divided region ([Section 2, paragraph 1]: proposed algorithm is summarized as follows. Both input images are divided into overlapping patches).
Regarding Claim 6, Tallón teaches the information processing apparatus according to Claim 1. In addition, Tallón teaches wherein the division processing unit sets a size of a division region and a size of an overlap region based on a feature amount of a predetermined region including the overlap region and a region in the vicinity thereof of the input depth data ([Section 2, paragraph 1]: Both input images are divided into overlapping patches, [Section 2.1]: The size of the block is relatively important to the algorithm. If the size of the block is too big, texture transfer from the color image to the depth image might occur. On the other hand, if the block size is too small the obtained depth map will be noisy and not accurate. In our experiments we found that a block size around 20×20 pixels for an image size of 420×378 gives very good results. Examiner notes the block size is decided based in part on the overlap size, of which the authors note they have experimented with block sizes to ensure the features of the images are not hindered. Examiner interpreting the predetermined region to be the block which includes an overlapping region and a non-overlapping region/region in the vicinity).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-5 and 7-8 are 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.
Conclusion
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/JANICE E. VAZ/Examiner, Art Unit 2667
/MATTHEW C BELLA/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2667