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 Interpretation
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(f):
(f) Element in Claim for a Combination. – An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
2. Claim limitation ““an acquisition unit, a position calculation unit, a type identification unit, a position transformation unit” have been interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, because it uses claim limitation uses the term "means" or "step" or a term used as a substitute for "means" that is a generic placeholder (also called a nonce term or a non-structural term having no specific structural meaning) for performing the claimed function; that coupled with functional language respectively recited after each of the aforementioned claim limitations, without reciting sufficient structure to achieve the function. Furthermore, the generic placeholder is not preceded by a structural modifier.
A review of the specification shows that the following appears to be the corresponding structure described in the specification for the 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph limitation: see figure 14 and 15 and corresponding text. If applicant wishes to provide further explanation or dispute the examiner’s interpretation of the corresponding structure, applicant must identify the corresponding structure with reference to the specification by page and line number, and to the drawing, if any, by reference characters in response to this Office action.
If applicant does not intend to have the claim limitation(s) treated under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) applicant may amend the claim(s) so that it/they will clearly not invoke 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or present a sufficient showing that the claim recites/recite sufficient structure, material, or acts for performing the claimed function to preclude application of 35 U.S.C. 112(f).
For more information, see MPEP § 2173 et seq. and Supplementary Examination Guidelines for Determining Compliance With 35 U.S.C. 112 and for Treatment of Related Issues in Patent Applications, 76 FR 7162, 7167 (Feb. 9, 2011).
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 1-11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C 101.
Regarding claims 1, and 11:
Step 1: These claims are directed towards a system and a method
Step 2A, prong 1: The claims recite the following limitations: " an acquisition step ……….. a position calculation step …….. a type identification step …………a position transformation step; and a moving object parameter determined according to the type of the moving object.."
A procedure carrying out the limitations mentioned above, under broadest reasonable interpretation, is a procedure reciting a mental-process type abstract idea, which can practically be performed in the mind, in a computer environment, or merely using the generic computer as a tool to perform the procedure. If a person obtained photographed images of a moving body or vehicle, he/she would be able to generate with a generic computer to calculate a local coordinate point and identifying a type of the moving object and transforming the local coordinate point into a moving object coordinate point and determine the parameter." To the extent the limitation are part of the claim and include “an acquisition unit ; a position calculation unit ; a type identification unit “are extra-solution data gathering activity. See In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943, 963 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), aff'd Bilski V. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593 (2010) (characterizing data gathering steps an insignificant extra-solution activity); Elec. Power Grp., LLC y. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350, 1353 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (holding that collecting information i: an abstract idea); CyberSource Corp. v. Retail Decisions, Inc., 654 F.3d 1366, 1375 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (holding that “purely mental processes can be unpatentable, even when performed by a computer, was precisely the holding of the Supreme Court in Gottschalk vy. Benson.").
Examiner notes that under the broadest reasonable interpretation of the claim limitation because the specification does not set forth any specific methodology of performing perspective transforming the local coordinate point into a moving object coordinate point that indicates the position of the moving object in a global coordinate system using an imaging parameter calculated, which is abstract. See In re Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior Univ., 989 F.3d 1367, 1373-1374 (Fed. Cir. 2021) (Claims directed to a computer implemented method for haplotype
phasing by using certain data and statistical tools to determine a haplotype phase (see id.at 1370) were determined to be "directed to the abstract idea of mathematically calculating alleles' haplotype phase" (see id. at 1373) and to be patent ineligible). If a claim, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components, then it is still in the mental processes category unless the claim cannot practically be performed in the mind. See Intellectual Ventures I LLC V. Symantec Corp., 838 F.3d 1307, 1318 (Fed. Cir. 2016) ("with the exception of generic computer-implemented steps, there is nothing in the claims themselves that foreclose them from being performed by a human, mentally or with pen and paper").Therefore, a person would be able to perform the above recited forming step mentally or with a generic computer.
As for Step 2B, claims 1 include additional element of “an acquisition unit; a position calculation unit that calculates a local coordinate point that indicates the position of the moving object in a local coordinate system using the captured image; a type identification unit that identifies a type of the moving object included in the captured image; and a position transformation unit that transforms the local coordinate point into a moving object coordinate point that indicates the position of the moving object in a global coordinate system using an imaging parameter calculated based on the position of the imaging device in the global coordinate system and a moving object parameter determined according to the type of the moving object” are nothing more than routine and well-known in the field of endeavor and there is no improvement to the technology.
As discussed in step 2A prong 2 above claims do not include additional elements
that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. Accordingly, claims 1, and 11 are directed to non-eligible patent subject matter and is therefore rejected.
Regarding claims 2-10, all the limitation recited in the claims are similar to the limitations discussed above. Thus, the rejection applied to claims 1 and 11 is applied to claims 2-10.
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.
The USPTO “Interim Guidelines for Examination of Patent Applications for Patent Subject Matter Eligibility” (Official Gazette notice of 23 February 2010), Annex IV, reads as follows:
The USPTO recognizes that applicants may have claims directed to computer readable media that cover signals per se, which the USPTO must reject under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as covering both non-statutory subject matter and statutory subject matter. In an effort to assist the patent community in overcoming a rejection or potential rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in this situation, the USPTO suggests the following approach. A claim drawn to such a computer readable medium that covers both transitory and non-transitory embodiments may be amended to narrow the claim to cover only statutory embodiments to avoid a rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 by adding the limitation "non-transitory" to the claim. Cf. Animals - Patentability, 1077 Off. Gaz. Pat. Office 24 (April 21, 1987) (suggesting that applicants add the limitation "non-human" to a claim covering a multi-cellular organism to avoid a rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101). Such an amendment would typically not raise the issue of new matter, even when the specification is silent because the broadest reasonable interpretation relies on the ordinary and customary meaning that includes signals per se. The limited situations in which such an amendment could raise issues of new matter occur, for example, when the specification does not support a non-transitory embodiment because a signal per se is the only viable embodiment such that the amended claim is impermissibly broadened beyond the supporting disclosure. See, e.g., Gentry Gallery, Inc. v. Berkline Corp., 134 F.3d 1473(Fed. Cir. 1998).
Claim(s) 12 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter as follows. Claim 12 defines a “computer program” embodying functional descriptive material. However, the claim does not define a non-transitory computer-readable medium or memory and is thus non-statutory for that reason (i.e., “examination the pending claims must be interpreted as broadly as their terms reasonably allow). The broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim drawn to a computer readable medium (also called machine readable medium and other such variations) typically covers forms of non-transitory tangible media and transitory propagating signals per se in view of the ordinary and customary meaning of computer readable media, particularly when the specification is silent. See MPEP 2111.01. When the broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim covers a signal per se, the claim must be rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as covering non-statutory subject matter. See In see Official Gazette Notice 1351 OG212, February 23,2010). That is, the scope of the presently claimed “computer program product ” typically covers forms of non-transitory tangible media and transitory propagating signals per se. The examiner suggests amending the claim to embody the program on a “computer readable medium” and adding the limitation ”non-transitory ” to the claim or equivalent in order to make the claim statutory. Any amendment to the claim should be commensurate with its corresponding disclosure.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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 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.
Claim(s) 1-12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Teng et al (US 2022/0277478) in view of Kocur et al (Detection of 3D Bounding Boxes of Vehicles Using Perspective Transformation for Accurate Speed Measurement).
As to claim 1, Teng et al teaches the position estimation device that estimates a position of a moving object, comprising: an acquisition unit that acquires a captured image including the moving object from an imaging device (receive the image shot by the conventional camera 670, 1202, figure 12A));
a position calculation unit that calculates a local coordinate point that indicates the position of the moving object in a local coordinate system using the captured image ( Obtain image coordinates of a target in an image shot by the camera, paragraph [0146]); note that Teng et al teaches obtaining image information of the target, and querying for a feature parameter of the vehicle based on the image information of the target, and obtaining world coordinates of the target based on the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera, the intrinsic parameter of the camera, and the image coordinates of the target includes obtaining, based on the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera ( paragraph [0167]
a type identification unit that identifies a type of the moving object included in the captured image (querying for a feature parameter of the vehicle based on the image information of the target includes querying for a vehicle type, a vehicle model, and/or a license plate category of the target based on the image information of the target, and querying for the feature parameter of the vehicle based on the vehicle type, the vehicle model, and/or the license plate category of the target, paragraph [0173]); and
a position transformation unit that transforms the local coordinate point into a moving object coordinate point that indicates the position of the moving object in a global coordinate system using an imaging parameter calculated based on the position of the imaging device in the global coordinate system (coordinate transformation may be performed on the image coordinates of the target, the physical transformation matrix corresponding to the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera, and the intrinsic parameter matrix of the camera, to obtain the world coordinates of the target. In this way, the target is positioned, and in a positioning process, the image coordinates of the target are first obtained by using an image processing method, and then the world coordinates of the target are calculated by using a mathematical formula, so that positioning precision is relatively high, paragraph [0184])
While Teng teaches the limitation above, Teng fails to teach “a moving object parameter determined according to the type of the moving object.
Specifically, Kocur et al teaches the license plates are detected by generating candidate regions around horizontal edges of moving vehicles. These regions are then validated using a T-HOG [27] descriptor and an SVM classifier. After the license plate is detected a few keypoints located within it are tracked using a pyramidal KLT tracker [2]. A manually obtained homography matrix is used to determine the real world coordinates of the tracked keypoints and thus also the speed of the vehicles ( section 2.5) . It would have been obvious to one skilled in the art before filing of the claimed invention to determine the parameters and use the descriptor as taught by Kocur in order to aid the object detection accuracy and enables an intuitive parametrization of the 3D bounding box of a vehicle as a 2D bounding box with one additional parameter. Thus, the claimed subject matter would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
As to claim 2, Teng et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 1, further comprising a direction information generation unit that generates direction information that indicates a movement direction of the moving object using the moving object coordinate point (the intrinsic parameter of the camera, and image coordinates of the first deviation, obtaining world coordinates of a second deviation based on the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera, the intrinsic parameter of the camera, and image coordinates of the second deviation, and calculating a distance between the world coordinates of the first deviation and the world coordinates of the second deviation, to obtain positioning precision of the target, paragraph [0185], paragraph [0008]).
As to claim 3, Teng et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 1, wherein when the local coordinate point is transformed into the moving object coordinate point, the position transformation unit substitutes a value of the moving object parameter acquired by the acquisition unit into a relational expression, which includes the moving object coordinate point as an objective variable and the local coordinate point, the imaging parameter, and the moving object parameter as explanatory variables (a physical transformation matrix corresponding to the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera, obtaining an intrinsic parameter matrix of the camera based on the intrinsic parameter of the camera, performing coordinate transformation on the image coordinates of the target, the physical transformation matrix corresponding to the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera, and the intrinsic parameter matrix of the camera, to obtain first world coordinates, and obtaining the world coordinates of the target based on the feature parameter of the vehicle, a height of the camera, a location of the camera, and the first world coordinates, paragraph [0167]).
As to claim 4, Teng teaches the position estimation device according to claim 1, further comprising a correction value setting unit that calculates a difference between the moving object parameter acquired by the acquisition unit and a reference parameter that indicates a reference value of the moving object parameter to set a correction parameter, which indicates a correction value relative to the reference parameter and is determined according to the type of the moving object identified by the type identification unit, wherein when the local coordinate point is transformed into the moving object coordinate point, the position transformation unit substitutes the correction parameter set by the correction value setting unit into a relational expression, which includes the moving object coordinate point as an objective variable and the local coordinate point, the imaging parameter, the reference parameter, and the correction parameter as explanatory variables(coordinate transformation may be performed on the image coordinates of the target, the physical transformation matrix corresponding to the estimated extrinsic parameter of the camera, and the intrinsic parameter matrix of the camera, to obtain the world coordinates of the target. In this way, the target is positioned, and in a positioning process, the image coordinates of the target are first obtained by using an image processing method, and then the world coordinates of the target are calculated by using a mathematical formula, so that positioning precision is relatively high, paragraph [0184]).
As to claim 5, Teng et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 4, wherein when the type of the moving object identified by the type identification unit is a predetermined type, the correction value setting unit sets the correction parameter to zero without calculating the difference ( if it is learned through query based on the image information of the target that the target is a vehicle of a model B of a brand A, a feature parameter (for example, a height of a vehicle head from ground) of the vehicle of the model B of the brand A may be obtained through query, paragraph [0174] note that correction parameter to zero can be obtain ed through query).
As to claim 6, Teng et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 1, wherein the imaging parameter is a height of the imaging device from a road surface calculated based on the position of the imaging device in the global coordinate system, and the moving object parameter is a height of a predetermined positioning point of the moving object from the road surface (a height of the camera, a location of the camera, and the first world coordinates includes calculating a distance between the first world coordinates and the world coordinates of the target based on a formula d.sub.1=G.sub.1*d.sub.2/G, and obtaining the world coordinates of the target based on the distance between the first world coordinates and the world coordinates of the target and the first world coordinates, paragraph [0176-0177]).
As to claim 7, Kocur et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 1, wherein the position calculation unit comprises: a detection unit that generates a first mask image to which a mask region masking the moving object in the captured image is added; a perspective transformation unit that performs perspective transformation of the first mask image; and a coordinate point calculation unit that corrects a first coordinate point using a second coordinate point, the first coordinate point being a specified vertex of a first bounding rectangle set in the mask region in the first mask image, the second coordinate point being a vertex that indicates the same position as the first coordinate point from among vertices of a second bounding rectangle set in the mask region in a second mask image that is obtained by perspective transformation of the first mask image (The process of creating annotations from provided mask of a vehicle. a) The original image. b) Mask (yellow) is obtained using Mask R-CNN [12]. c) Both the mask and the image is transformed using the transformation for the pair VP2-VP3 (see subsection 3.3). d) The 2D bounding box (green rectangle) and the two lines (dotted red) originating in VPU and tangent to the mask are drawn, figure 5).
As to claim 8, Teng et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 7, wherein the position calculation unit further comprises a rotation processing unit that rotates the captured image so that a movement direction of the moving object faces a predetermined direction (The image coordinates of the first deviation are coordinates obtained after a deviation d is added to the image coordinates of the target towards a vehicle traveling direction. The image coordinates of the second deviation are coordinates obtained after the deviation d is subtracted from the image coordinates of the target towards the vehicle traveling direction, paragraph [0186-0188]).
As to claim 9, Kocur et al teaches the position estimation device according to claim 7, wherein the position calculation unit further comprises a distortion correction unit that corrects distortion in the captured image (setting a condition that the transformed image should contain as much relevant information as possible; use a mask of the surveilled traffic lanes for the construction of the transformation instead of the whole image. For evaluation we use the BrnoCompSpeed dataset [34] in which the masks are already provided. In other cases the masks can be obtained automatically by utilizing optical flow [9]. Secondly, we heuristically set a limit that no more than 20% of the pixels in the transformed image should correspond to pixels which lie outside of the mask in the original image (i.e. corrects distortion). In the evaluation section we show that this approach not only makes the algorithm fully automatic, but also leads to better accuracy for the speed estimation task; section 3.1 , image transformation).
The limitation of claims 10-12 has been addressed in claim 1 above .
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to NANCY BITAR whose telephone number is (571)270-1041. The examiner can normally be reached Mon-Friday from 8:00 am to 5:00 p.m..
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NANCY . BITAR
Examiner
Art Unit 2664
/NANCY BITAR/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2664