DETAILED ACTIONNotice 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)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1, 4-10 and 13-19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by He et al (2024/0096072) (herein “He”). In regards to claims 1, 10 and 19, He teaches a method of image inpainting, the method comprising: receiving, via a data interface, a masked input image and a mask (See; Fig. 1 and p[0026] for input image 102 that is divided into a plurality of patches 104 that are masked according to some masking criteria); generating, via a pretrained model, a first pass inpainted image based on the masked input image; generating a plurality of variants of the first pass inpainted image (See; Figs. 1 -3 and p[0027]-p[0030] where each patch may be masked at different ratios during a pre training process and a set of patches (variants) 106a-106n are selected to be fed into the encoder 110) generating, via a first encoder, a vector representation of the masked input image (See; Fig. 1 and p[0031] for encoder 110 that outputs a vector representation 112); and generating, via a first decoder, a plurality of output images based on the vector representation of the masked input image and conditioned by the plurality of variants of the first pass inpainted image (See; Fig. 1 and p[0041] for Decoder 116 outputting a plurality of predicted pixel values 118 for each masked patch 108 which generate a reconstructed image 120). In regards to claims 4 and 13, He teaches wherein the generating the plurality of output images is further conditioned by the mask (See; Fig. 1 where the output image is conditioned by the masking process in 106a-106n).
In regards to claims 5 and 14, He teaches wherein the first decoder includes a plurality of residual blocks (See; p[0033]-p[0034] for residual connections through a layer of normalization).
In regards to claims 6 and 15, He teaches wherein each residual block of the plurality of residual blocks includes one or more region normalization layers (See; p[0033]-p[0034] and p[0040]-p[0041] for residual connections through a layer of normalization).
In regards to claims 7 and 16, He teaches wherein the one or more region normalization layers computes respective mean and variance vectors for different regions defined by the mask, wherein the normalization performed by the region normalization layers is based on the respective mean and variance vectors (See; p[0040]-p[0041] where normalization layers use mean and learned vectors for different patches to be predicted).
In regards to claims 8 and 17, He teaches wherein each residual block of the plurality of residual blocks includes one or more up-sampling layers (See; p[0039] for reconstructing missing pixels which could be considered up sampling).
In regards to claims 9 and 18, He teaches further comprising: updating parameters of the first decoder via backpropagation based on a loss function, wherein the loss function includes a comparison of at least one of the plurality of output images to at least one ground-truth image (See; p[0042] and p[0055] where a loss function may compare ground-truth pixel values to the predicted pixel values from the decoder).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2, 3, 11, 12 and 20 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.
Conclusion
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/JONATHAN A BOYD/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2627
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