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 Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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 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)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-4 and 9-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Flynn et al. (USPAP 2025/0131,603), hereinafter, “Flynn”.
Regarding claim 1, Flynn recites, a point cloud decoding device configured to decode a point cloud from a bit stream (Please note, claim 2. As indicated a method of decoding a bitstream of a point cloud data.), the point cloud decoding device comprising a circuit, wherein the circuit: stores occupancy information of a child hierarchical node indicating whether or not the child hierarchical node is occupied; and predicts occupancy information of a child node indicating whether or not the child node is occupied using the occupancy information of the child hierarchical node. (Please note, claim 2. As indicated the point cloud being defined in a tree structure having an ordered sequence of levels comprising a plurality of nodes having parent-child relationships and that represent the geometry of a volumetric space repeatedly split into sub-volumes based on the levels of the tree, the method comprising: for a current node associated with a volume split into sub-volumes, each sub-volume corresponding to a child node of the current node, selecting a probability distribution from among a plurality of probability distributions, wherein the selecting is based on occupancy data for a plurality of neighboring nodes of the current node.).
Regarding claim 2, Flynn recites, wherein the circuit: further stores occupancy information of a parent hierarchical node indicating whether or not the parent hierarchical node is occupied (Please note, paragraph 0030. As indicated the occupancy data is a pattern of occupancy for a parent node to the current node, and the plurality of nodes include sibling nodes to the current node that share the same the parent node.), and predicts the occupancy information of the child node using the occupancy information of the child hierarchical node and the occupancy information of the parent hierarchical node. (Please note, claim 7. As indicated predicting a predicted occupancy pattern for the current node, wherein the selecting the probability distribution is based on the predicted occupancy pattern.).
Regarding claim 3, Flynn recites, wherein the circuit predicts that the child node near which the child hierarchical node that is occupied exists is occupied. (Please note, paragraph 0033. As indicated determining that more than one of the child nodes is occupied, and encoding a flag indicating that more than one of the child nodes is occupied.).
Regarding claim 4, Flynn recites, wherein the circuit predicts that the child node located between the child node predicted to be occupied and the parent hierarchical node that is occupied is occupied. (Please note, paragraph 0073. As indicated the encoder and decoder each maintain more than one pattern distribution (e.g. set of probabilities associated with occupancy patterns) and select the pattern distribution to be used in coding a particular node's pattern of occupancy based on some occupancy information from previously-coded nodes near the particular node. In one example implementation, the occupancy information is obtained from the pattern of occupancy of the parent to the particular node. In another example implementation, the occupancy information is obtained from one or more nodes neighboring the particular node.).
Regarding claim 9, Flynn recites, wherein the circuit selects the child hierarchical node and/or the parent hierarchical node to be referred to depending on a distance from the child node. (Please note, paragraph 0048. As indicated reference is now made to FIG. 1, which shows a simplified block diagram of a point cloud encoder 10 in accordance with aspects of the present application. The point cloud encoder 10 includes a tree building module 12 for receiving point cloud data and producing a tree (in this example, an octree) representing the geometry of the volumetric space containing point cloud and indicating the location or position of points from the point cloud in that geometry.).
Regarding claim 10, Flynn recites, wherein the circuit selects the child hierarchical node and/or the parent hierarchical node to be referred to depending on a degree of improvement in compression performance in a case where a point cloud for training is encoded using intra prediction. (Please note, paragraph 0097. As indicated to provide a compression improvement with a negligible increase in coding complexity. The neighbor-based selection shows a better compression performance than the parent-pattern based selection, although it has a greater computational complexity and memory usage.).
Regarding claim 11, Flynn recites, wherein the circuit divides a scanning range of a sensor and store coordinates of the child hierarchical node located in each divided range. (Please note, paragraph 0059. As indicated processes is used to build the tree, it may be traversed in a pre-defined order (breadth-first or depth-first, and in accordance with a scan pattern/order within each divided sub-volume) to produce a sequence of bits from the flags (occupancy and/or splitting flags). This may be termed the serialization or binarization of the tree. As shown in FIG. 1, in this example, the point cloud encoder 10 includes a binarizer 14 for binarizing the octree to produce a bitstream of binarized data representing the tree.).
Regarding claims 12-13, similar analysis as those presented for claim 1, are applicable.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 5-8 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.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: The closest applied Prior Art of record fails to disclose or reasonably suggest wherein the circuit predicts that the child node is occupied when the child hierarchical node located on a path of a laser beam spaced away from a position of the child node by a scanning interval of a sensor is occupied; the circuit estimate a position of the child hierarchical node including a point spaced away from a position of the child node by a scanning interval of a sensor, and predict that the child node is occupied when the child hierarchical node of which the position has been estimated is occupied.
Examiner’s Note
The examiner cites particular figures, paragraphs, columns and line numbers in the references as applied to the claims for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claims, other passages and figures may apply as well.
It is respectfully requested that, in preparing responses, the applicant fully consider the references in their entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
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/AMIR ALAVI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2668 Saturday, January 24, 2026