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 .
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.
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)(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 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Lin et al (12,430,919).
Regarding claims 1, 8 and 15 Lin discloses,
Receive an image depicting multiple objects belonging to different classes (note col. 7 lines 21-24, cites machine learning recognize object for classification);
Generate preliminary bounding boxes for the multiple objects, wherein each of the preliminary bounding boxes comprises a size, a location, a class, and a confidence score (note col. 3 lines 13-30);
Select a first subset of bounding boxes by performing a per-class suppression of the preliminary bounding boxes (note col. 3 lines 13-30;
Select a second subset of bounding boxes by performing a class-agnostic suppression of the first subset of bounding boxes (note col. 3 lines 13-30); and
Based on the second subset of bounding boxes, generate at least one of an enriched image or a video index (note col. 3 lines 13-30).
Regarding claims 2 and 16 Lin discloses,
Wherein performing the per-class suppression comprises: grouping the preliminary bounding boxes by class (note col. 3 lines 32- col. 4 lines 9, bounding box similarity determined); and separately performing Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) on each of the groups of preliminary bounding boxes (note col. 4 lines 33-43, bounding box suppressed if it is determined that the newly-detected bounding box is sufficiently similar to a region of merged bounding boxes)
Regarding claim 3 Lin disclose
Wherein performing the class-agnostic suppression comprises performing NMS on the first subset of bounding boxes without regard to class (note col. 10 lines 30-35, suppression of bounding boxes).
Regarding claims 4, 12 and 20 Lin discloses
Wherein: the per-class suppression utilizes a per-class intersection-over-union (IoU) threshold (note col. 3 lines 17-26 and col. 10 lines 25-34, suppression utilizes filter); the class-agnostic suppression utilizes a class-agnostic IoU threshold (note col. 10 lines 25-34, suppression utilizes filter); and the class-agnostic IoU threshold is greater than the per-class IoU threshold (note col. 10 lines 25-34, suppression utilizes filter);
Regarding claim 5 Lin discloses
Wherein the class-agnostic IoU threshold is at least twice the per-class IoU threshold (note col. 10 lines 25-34, suppression utilizes filter).
Regarding claims 6, 13, 17 and 19 Lin discloses,
Wherein the class-agnostic IoU threshold is greater than 0.8, and the per-class IoU threshold is within a range of 0.3-0.45 (note col. 10 lines 25-34, suppression utilizes filter);
Regarding claims 7, 9 and 14 Lin discloses,
Wherein the image is part of video data, and the operations comprise generating the video index (note col. 2 lines 9-19, streaming video as image data).
Regarding claims 10 and 18 Lin discloses,
Wherein the first object at least partially occludes the second object in the image (note col. 3 lines 27-32, overlap).
Regarding claim 11 Lin discloses,
Wherein the second subset of bounding boxes includes a single bounding box for the first object and a single bounding box for the second object (note col. 12 lines 1-15, second bounding box).
Related Prior Art
Tang et al (10,565,473) Generate preliminary bounding boxes for the multiple objects, wherein each of the preliminary bounding boxes comprises a size, a location, a class, and a confidence score (note fig. 6 block 605 and 607 and col. 11 lines – col. 12 lines 10).
Wang et al (10,755,114) Receive an image depicting multiple objects belonging to different classes (note fig. 7 and col. 10 lines 27-50, input image and tree classifier).
Conclusion
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G.D.
June 25, 2026
/GREGORY M DESIRE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2676
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