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 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.
Claims 1, 9 and 17 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. Applicant uses the term “gradienting” in the limitation “setting the color of the hole face by gradienting the color value of each of the associated vertices with a color value of an adjacent vertex”. The term “gradienting” is not commonly used in prior and is indefinite as it could refer to two different meanings. Prior art describes methods of color estimation which use gradient descent algorithms for calculating color values and as applying a color gradation between two different colors. Because of this, the term “gradienting” is indefinite and does not distinctly claim the subject matter. Examiner would consider the following possible amendments, based on information gleaned from the specification, to overcome this rejection:
setting the color of the hole face using color gradation of the color value of each of the associated vertices with a color value of an adjacent vertex
or
setting each of the associated vertices as a starting point and setting the color of the hole face applying a color gradient of the color value of each of the associated vertices and a color value of an adjacent vertex
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1, 9 and 17 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action.
Claims 2-7, 10-15 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 following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: The prior that most closely aligns with the amended limitations of claim 1 (those not addressed in the previous office action) is Fan (L. Fan, L. Chen, C. Zhang, W. Tian and D. Cao, "Collaborative Three-Dimensional Completion of Color and Depth in a Specified Area With Superpixels," in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 66, no. 8, pp. 6260-6269, Aug. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TIE.2018.2873474). Fan describes a method for completing blank areas of a 3D map with the use of color and depth images. Fan also describes determining the color of the hole face by applying a color gradient. This gradient calculation starts from a boundary of a hole region, continuing based on a priority calculation (Section IV A). This priority calculation can be considered analogous to a weight. Therefore Fan can be considered to teach performing global color correction for each of the plurality of image subsets based on weights between wherein the image subsets are the to be completed patches. Fan does not explicitly describe the association and segmentation of the image set into image subsets, but rather teaches segmenting and processing a single image for the entire set of images. However, under broadest reasonable interpretation a portion of an image can be considered an image itself, therefore making both the patches and superpixels images under BRI. Therefore Fan’s color completion can be considered analogous to color correction for each of the plurality of image subsets based on weights between associated color images. Additionally, and importantly, while Fan could be considered to minimize a color difference between each face subset (Section IV B), Fan does not describe performing local color correction for equalizing a color difference between faces included in each face subset. This is because the minimization of color difference is not directly used for performing local color correction, but rather for segmenting the image into the “superpixels”. This segmenting is further used in completing depth information of the target area (Section IV C). While this is used in combination with the color completion/correction described in section IV A, it is only “filled with the information collected during color inpaint” (Section IV D) rather than influencing the color completion process, which would be necessary to teach local color correction for equalizing a color difference.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Aidan W McCoy whose telephone number is (571)272-5935. The examiner can normally be reached 8:00 AM-5:00 PM EST.
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/AIDAN W MCCOY/Examiner, Art Unit 2611
/TAMMY GODDARD/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2611
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