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 .
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments received 29 May 2026 have been fully considered. Claims 1-6 are pending. Claims 1-3 and 6 have been amended.
Applicant’s efforts to address objections to the specification are satisfactory, therefore all objections to the specification are withdrawn.
Applicant’s efforts to address the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) have been considered. While some of the issues have been adequately addressed, the amendments have introduced new issues. See 112(b) rejections below.
Applicant’s arguments regarding the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 101 have been considered.
Applicant argues that the claims do not recite judicial exceptions because a claim is not directed to a mental process if it cannot be performed in the human mind. Applicant further argues that any exception is integrated into a practical application of improving the accuracy and reliability of DAS-P by eliminating false vibration detections caused by phase unwrapping errors.
The examiner notes that steps such as performing a phase connection process, performing outlier correction, and correcting phase values all represent mathematical operations, and so are judicial exceptions whether or not they can be performed in the human mind. Furthermore, the examiner does not consider the judicial exceptions to be integrated into a practical application. First of all, phase unwrapping is not recited, rather “phase connection” is. These terms are not synonymous under broadest reasonable interpretation. Second, performing a “phase connection process” on a “position” on an optical fiber and “a phase value” at a number of times is general enough that it does not immediately suggest improving a particular process, much less distributed acoustic sensing specifically. Third, as argued with reference to claim 5 in the previous office action, neither a measurement nor devices other than a signal processing device are explicitly recited. While an optical fiber and a light pulse are recited, the claim is written so that these may simply describe the set of data. All of the limitations of the claims may be met by a computer which accesses a data file and processes it; no optical fiber, measurement apparatus, or communication between the computer and a measurement apparatus would be required for infringement. See 101 rejections below.
Applicant’s arguments regarding the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been considered. Although the claims have been amended, the examiner considers that the prior art of record still teach or render obvious the claim limitations. See 103 rejections below.
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.
Claim 2 is 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 2 recites adding a correction value to a phase value at “the correction target position,” which has no antecedent basis. Claim 1 refers to a set of correction target positions (although the examiner wishes to note that, as written, the “correction target positions among positions on the optical fiber” recited in claim 1 can be interpreted under broadest reasonable interpretation as referring to any set of positions or no positions at all). However, claim 2 refers to a singular correction target position which has not previously been identified in the claim language. For examination purposes it will be assumed that “the correction target position” should be replaced with “a correction target position”.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(d):
(d) REFERENCE IN DEPENDENT FORMS.—Subject to subsection (e), a claim in dependent form shall contain a reference to a claim previously set forth and then specify a further limitation of the subject matter claimed. A claim in dependent form shall be construed to incorporate by reference all the limitations of the claim to which it refers.
The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, fourth paragraph:
Subject to the following paragraph [i.e., the fifth paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112], a claim in dependent form shall contain a reference to a claim previously set forth and then specify a further limitation of the subject matter claimed. A claim in dependent form shall be construed to incorporate by reference all the limitations of the claim to which it refers.
Claim 5 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(d) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, 4th paragraph, as being of improper dependent form for failing to further limit the subject matter of the claim upon which it depends, or for failing to include all the limitations of the claim upon which it depends.
Claim 5 depends from claim 1 and recites the same limitations as claim 1 without adding any other limitations. Therefore, claim 5 fails to further limit the subject matter of the claim upon which it depends.
Applicant may cancel the claim(s), amend the claim(s) to place the claim(s) in proper dependent form, rewrite the claim(s) in independent form, or present a sufficient showing that the dependent claim(s) complies with the statutory requirements.
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 1-6 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
At Step 1 of the 101 analysis, all claims are directed to one of the statutory categories of invention.
Claim 1 is rejected in response to the following analysis:
At Step 2A, Prong One, the judicial exceptions are bolded in the copy of claim 1 below:
A signal processing method executed by a signal processing device, comprising:
performing a phase connection process on a position on an optical fiber obtained by causing a light pulse to be incident to the optical fiber, the position being in a range based on a spatial resolution, and a phase value at each of a plurality of times;
performing outlier correction of a phase value for each position on the optical fiber in a longitudinal direction of the optical fiber at a predetermined time among the plurality of times based on a result of the phase connection process; and
correcting a phase value at a time other than the predetermined time for each of correction target positions among positions on the optical fiber.
A “phase connection process,” “outlier correction,” and “correcting a phase value” all represent mathematical or mental processes depending on the complexity of the operations performed.
At Step 2A, Prong Two, the additional element is a “signal processing device” which is encompassed by a general-purpose computer. While the data represent positions along an optical fiber and the “signal” represents a light pulse incident on an optical fiber, no measurement is explicitly recited, nor are any physical elements positively recited other than the signal processing device.
When considering claim 1 as a whole, a device processes an optical fiber signal by connecting phase over a time range at values representing a position on the optical fiber, corrects outliers for values representing other positions on the optical fiber at some time in the time range, then corrects phase at some other time for other positions. The term “phase connection process” does not give a specific idea of what operations are being performed on phase values to connect them. It is not clear that the limitations produce a particular practical result. All of the limitations of the claims may be met by a computer which accesses a data file and processes it; no optical fiber, measurement apparatus, or communication between the computer and a measurement apparatus would be required for infringement. For these reasons, the additional element does not integrate the judicial exceptions into a practical application.
At Step 2B, the claim as a whole does not amount to significantly more than the judicial exceptions for the reasons given above.
Claims 2-4 depend from claim 1 but do not address any of the issues raised in the rejection of claim 1, therefore these claims are also rejected.
Claim 5 recites the same limitations as claim 1 and is rejected for the same reasons.
Claim 6 recites a signal processing device comprising processing circuitry which implements the method of claim 1, and which is rejected for the same reasons.
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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claims 1, 5, and 6 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ellmauthaler (US 20170183959 A1) in view of QI (US 20160285659 A1).
Regarding claim 1, Ellmauthaler discloses a signal processing method executed by a signal processing device (Abstract: "The system also includes at least one processing unit that calculates I/Q data from the digitized electrical signals, corrects the I/Q data based on ellipse fitting, determines phase values based on the corrected I/Q data, and determines distributed sensing parameter values based on the phase values."), comprising:
performing a phase connection process (phase unwrapping, see below) on a position on an optical fiber (measurements reflecting positions along an optical fiber; the space refers to a set of positions along an optical fiber; see below) obtained by causing a light pulse to be incident to the optical fiber (Abstract: “an interrogator [provides] source light to the optical fiber. The system also includes a receiver coupled to the optical fiber. The receiver includes at least one fiber optic coupler that receives backscattered light”), the position being in a range based on a spatial resolution (due to the non-zero duration of a light pulse, at any given moment the light incident upon the detector would be from a range of reflection locations along the optical fiber), and a phase value (¶23: "The light source transmits light pulses along the fiber optic cable 44, which contains a fiber with scattering impurities. As each pulse of light propagates along the fiber, some of the pulse is scattered back along the fiber from every point on the fiber…The optical port of the surface interface 66 communicates backscattered light to the detector, which responsively produces interferometry measurements from backscattered light attributes (e.g., phase or phase shift) corresponding to different points along the fiber optic cable 44." ¶58: "At block 750, a wrapped phase is calculated using the corrected I/Q values (e.g., phase=a tan 2(Q,I)). At block 752, a delta phase is calculated by comparing the current phase value with a previous phase value, and phase unwrapping is performed.").
Ellmauthaler does not explicitly say that the phase connection process is performed at a position on the optical fiber and at each of a plurality of times, however noting that phase (relative to a reference) should monotonically increase over time as light reflects from a particular position along the optical fiber, it would have been obvious to perform the phase unwrapping process at a position in a space and at each of a plurality of times.
Ellmauthaler does not explicitly disclose the remaining limitations of claim 1.
QI discloses a method of detecting a burst signal (Abstract). As part of this method, QI discloses performing outlier correction of phase values (outlier filter 983; see below) for positions in space in a predetermined direction of the space (Fig. 14: phase values along index number “i” are sequentially examined; see below) at some time based on a result of a phase unwrapping process (¶113: "phase unwrapping may be subject to phase jumps of +/−2 π or multiples of +/−2π (referred to herein as cycle-slips) in low [signal-to-noise ratio] SNR conditions. Accordingly…a cycle slip filter 981 [] is used to reduce cycle slip effects. Moreover, the cycle-slip corrected phase samples may be subject to outliers, especially in low SNR conditions. Accordingly…an outlier filter 983 [is provided] (described below with reference to FIGS. 14A and 14B)." Fig. 14A: an unwrapped phase value indexed by i-2 is corrected to a weighted average of phase values i and i-3 (See definition of mid1 in S1405 and note that i-2 is replaced by mid1 in S1411 if a set of conditions exist)).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to incorporate the teachings of QI with the invention of Ellmauthaler by performing outlier correction of a phase value for each position on the optical fiber in a longitudinal direction of the optical fiber at a predetermined time among the plurality of times based on a result of the phase connection process. Doing so would have enabled one to fix errors in phase unwrapping that may occur due to noise.
Furthermore, it would have been obvious to correct a phase value at a time other than the predetermined time for each of correction target positions among positions on the optical fiber in order to fix phase unwrapping errors that exist at various times.
Regarding claim 5, the arguments for rejecting claim 1 apply to claim 5, which is rejected for the same reasons.
Regarding claim 6, claim 6 recites the signal processing device of claim 1, which comprises processing circuitry and performs the method of claim 1. Claim 6 is therefore rejected for the same reasons as claim 1.
Claims 2-3 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ellmauthaler (US 20170183959 A1) in view of QI (US 20160285659 A1), and further in view of Nishiguchi (“Phase unwrapping for fiber-optic distributed acoustic sensing”).
Regarding claim 3, Ellmauthaler in view of QI teaches the limitations of claim 1, and further teaches that in the performing outlier correction, correction of adding a correction value to a phase value at a second time later than a reference time is performed (QI, Fig. 4, S1411 shows that a phase value at i-2 is replaced with mid1; replacing the original value with mid1 is equivalent to adding a correction value to change the value at i-2 to be mid1. Define whatever value must be added at i-2 to reach mid1 as the “correction value”. Furthermore, the correction point is associated with a time; define the correction point’s time as “a second time” and some earlier time as “a reference time.”).
Ellmauthaler in view of QI does not explicitly teach that, in the correcting a phase value, correction of adding the correction value to a phase value in ascending order of time for each of times later than the second time is performed.
Note that each measurement represents a position along a fiber and a time at which the light was incident at that location. Let indices
r
2
and
n
2
to represent the discrete position and time values associated with the corrected phase, and let
c
be the correction value. The above limitations are met by adding
c
to all phase measurements at
r
2
and with time indices
n
>
n
2
.
In claim 1, phase unwrapping was performed at a position along the time parameter. Ellmauthaler does not describe how phase unwrapping is performed, but it is reasonable that phase unwrapping may be performed at a particular location by iterating from earlier to later times. In such a case, errors may be additive over time.
Consider the teachings of Nishiguchi. Nishiguchi depicts the results of phase unwrapping over the parameter
n
using the Itoh algorithm, a known method for phase unwrapping (pg. 83, column 1, last paragraph, and Fig. 14). When large noise is present, as in Fig. 14(c), an error in phase unwrapping occurs near
n
=
3
, and persists for all values
n
>
3
. To correct this, the same correction factor is applied for all values after the error point (see dashed line in Fig. 4(c)).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to incorporate the teachings of Nishiguchi with the invention of Ellmauthaler in view of QI by using the Itoh algorithm to perform phase unwrapping and to, in the correcting a phase value, add the correction value to a phase value in order from an earlier side for each of times later than the second time is performed. Doing so would enable one to incorporate a known method for performing phase unwrapping, and would further enable one to remove the error from all affected points.
Regarding claim 2, the arguments for rejecting claim 3 apply to claim 2 if the Itoh algorithm is performed in order from larger to smaller time values (the arguments for claim 3 apply even though claim 2 includes the limitation that the correction value is added “at a correction target position”; this may be interpreted simply as a position for which a correction is needed). Doing so would have been obvious to try, as the direction of implementation does not change the effectiveness of phase unwrapping, and the results would have been predictable by one of ordinary skill in the art.
Claim 4 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ellmauthaler (US 20170183959 A1) in view of QI (US 20160285659 A1), and further in view of Yao (“Using Hampel identifier to eliminate profile-isolated outliers in laser vision measurement”) and Bhowmik (“Outlier removal in facial surface electromyography through Hampel filtering technique”).
Regarding claim 4, Ellmauthaler in view of QI teaches the limitations of claim 1 but does not explicitly teach the limitations of claim 4.
Yao teaches that the Hampel identifier is a robust and effective outlier identification method across various scientific fields (Pg. 2, column 1, first paragraph: "Hampel identifier is considered as one of the most robust and effective outlier identification method, which has been applied in different scientific fields and has achieved good results").
Bhowmik teaches that, during implementation of the Hampel identifier, a detected outlier may be replaced with the local median (Pg. 258, column 2, last paragraph: “The outliers detected in the window are replaced by the median value of the windowed data”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to incorporate the teachings of Yao and Bhowmik with the invention of Ellmauthaler in view of QI by, in the performing outlier correction, performing correction using a Hampel identifier. Doing so would enable one to use a statistically robust and effective method of identifying and correcting outliers.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Egea (US 20190302244 A1) teaches phase unwrapping and mitigates unwrapping errors that occur in low signal to noise areas (¶5). An unwrapping error correction module can substitute erroneous pixels based on information from neighboring pixels, thus removing misclassified phases (¶50; see also Fig. 4).
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ETHAN WESLEY EDWARDS whose telephone number is (571)272-0266. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday, 7:30am-5pm.
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ETHAN WESLEY EDWARDS
Examiner
Art Unit 2857
/E.W.E./ Examiner, Art Unit 2857
/ANDREW SCHECHTER/ Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2857
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