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 .
This office action is in response to applicant’s filing dated 5/31/2024, claims 1-20 are currently pending in the application.
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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claim(s) 1-5, 7-14, 16-19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Thomas et al. (US 20240381046 A1) hereinafter Thomas in view of Borggaard et al. (US 20150219755 A1) hereinafter Borggaard in view of Pardo et al. (US 20130064379 A1) hereinafter Pardo.
Regarding claim 1 Thomas teaches An audio system (“FIG. 1A shows an example of an audio environment” in ¶[0040]) comprising: a first loudspeaker (100C in Fig. 1A) to transmit a first audio signal (120C in Fig. 1A) including and a first signature tone into a listening environment (“generating calibration signals that are injected (e.g., mixed) into the audio content being rendered by audio devices in an audio environment” in ¶[0117]); a second loudspeaker (100A in Fig. 1A) including: at least one controller (160 in Fig. 1B) being programmed to: transmit a second audio signal (120A in Fig. 1A) including a second signature tone into the listening environment (“generating calibration signals that are injected (e.g., mixed) into the audio content being rendered by audio devices in an audio environment” in ¶[0117]); receive the first audio signal including and the first signature tone (“each participating audio device in an audio environment may be configured to do the foregoing whilst also detecting audio device playback sound from other orchestrated audio devices in the audio environment and processing the audio device playback sound to extract the acoustic calibration signals” in ¶[0118]); Thomas does not specifically disclose the system further comprising receive the second audio signal including the second signature tone after transmitting the second signature tone into the listening environment; determine an estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker based at least on the first signature tone and the second signature tone; and perform a time frequency masking operation to extract a least one of the first signature tone from the first audio signal and the second signature tone from the second audio signal prior to determining the estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker however,
Since it is known in the art as evidenced by Borggaard for a system to further comprise receive the second audio signal including the second signature tone after transmitting the second signature tone into the listening environment; determine an estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker based at least on the first signature tone and the second signature tone (“Device A may receive an indication that it has emitted a chirp at time 0 or at sample 0 and receive device B's chirp at time 4.5 seconds later, i.e., 4.5 seconds after the first chirp is emitted by A. Device B may emit its chirp at time 0 and receive device A's chirp 1.5 seconds earlier, i.e., at a time -1.5s relative to the time Device B emitted its chirp. By comparing the interval between chirps as detected by each device, the distance between the devices may be known.” in ¶[0012]);
An ordinary skilled in the art would be motivated to modify the invention of Thomas with the teachings of Borggaard for the benefit of improving the accuracy of the system, therefore it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Thomas with Borggaard,
Thomas as modified by Borggaard does not specifically disclose the system further comprising perform a time frequency masking operation to extract a least one of the first signature tone from the first audio signal and the second signature tone from the second audio signal prior to determining the estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker however,
Since it is known in the art as evidenced by Pardo for a system to further comprise perform a time frequency masking operation to extract a least one of the first signature tone from the first audio signal and the second signature tone from the second audio signal (“The time-frequency mask M is then symmetrized and applied to the STFT X of the mixture signal .chi.. An estimated music signal (e.g., the repeating structure in the mixture signal .chi.) can be obtained by inverting the resulting STFT into the time domain. The estimated voice signal (e.g., the non-repeating structure in the mixture signal .chi.) can be obtained by subtracting the time-domain music signal from the mixture signal .chi.. One example of derivation of the repeating spectrogram model W and the building of the soft time-frequency mask M are illustrated in the third row 104 of FIG. 1. In one embodiment, a binary time-frequency mask M can be derived by forcing time-frequency bins in the mask M with values above a certain threshold distance t.epsilon.[0,1] to a value of 1, while the rest is forced to a value of 0” in ¶[0057]),
An ordinary skilled in the art would be motivated to modify the invention of Thomas as modified by Borggaard with the teachings of Pardo for the benefit of improving the quality if the output of the system, therefore it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Thomas as modified with Borggaard with Pardo,
Pardo does not specifically disclose the system further comprising the masking is performed prior to determining the estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker however,
Thomas teaches the system further comprising the masking is performed prior to determining the estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker (In Fig. 29, a process includes the steps of masking noise of specific bands in step 2908, later in step 2913 the process estimates scene metrics).
Regarding claim 2, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 1, Borggaard further teaches the system further comprising wherein the second loudspeaker includes a first microphone to receive the first audio signal to provide a first received audio signal and a second microphone to receive the first audio signal to provide a second received audio signal (See device 2 620 in Fig. 6, and “each of the first mobile device, the second mobile device, and the third mobile device may have at least two microphones. An audio signal may be received for each microphone on a device” in ¶[0037]).
Regarding claim 3, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 2, Pardo further teaches wherein the at least one controller is further programmed to perform a Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) operation on the first received audio signal and the second received audio signal (“The time-frequency mask M is then symmetrized and applied to the STFT X of the mixture signal .chi..” in ¶[0057]) Padro does not specifically disclose the system further comprising to apply a predetermined overlap thereto prior to performing the time frequency masking operation however Thomas teaches to apply a predetermined overlap thereto prior to performing the time frequency masking operation (“The receive-side beamforming may, for example, involve delaying and multiplying the signal from each microphone in the array of microphones by different factors.” in ¶[0186]).
Regarding claim 4, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 3, Pardo further teaches the system further comprising wherein the at least one controller is further programed to perform the STFT operation to convert the first received audio signal and the second received audio signal from a time domain into a frequency domain (“The time-frequency mask M is then symmetrized and applied to the STFT X of the mixture signal .chi..” in ¶[0057]).
Regarding claim 5, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 2, Thomas further teaches the system further comprising wherein the at least one controller is further programmed to perform a first cross correlation operation (“Demodulation of the microphone signals 206A may, for example, be performed using standard correlation techniques including integrate and dump style matched filtering correlator banks.” in ¶[0162]) to determine one or more delays associated with the first received audio signal and the second received audio signal (“The calibration signal received by an audio device from another contains information about the distance between the two devices in the form of the time-of-flight (ToF) of the signal. According to some examples, a control system may be configured to extract delay information from a demodulated calibration signal and convert the delay information to a pseudorange measurement” in ¶[0169]).
Regarding claim 7, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 2, Thomas further teaches the system further comprising wherein the at least one controller is further programmed to determine the estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker based at least on a time of arrival of the first signature tone on the first received audio signal and a time of arrival of the first signature tone on the second received audio signal (“The calibration signal received by an audio device from another contains information about the distance between the two devices in the form of the time-of-flight (ToF) of the signal” in ¶[0169]).
Regarding claim 8, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 7, Pardo further teaches the system further comprising (“Each time-frequency bin in a segment is compared to the model, and a mixture of the recording is partitioned using binary time-frequency masking by labeling bins that are similar to the model as the repeating background” in ¶[0036]).
Regarding claim 9, Thomas as modified by Borggaard and Pardo teaches the system of claim 1, Borggaard further teaches the system further comprising wherein the second loudspeaker is further programmed to transmit the estimated distance between the first loudspeaker and the second loudspeaker to a mobile device (“Whether the determination of the distance between the first mobile device 310 and the second mobile device 320 is performed locally, such as by the first mobile device 310, or remotely, such as by a server 330, the first mobile device may obtain an indication of a first distance between the first mobile device and the second mobile device. For example, a remote server 330 may transmit an indication of the first distance to the first mobile device and/or the second mobile device 334” in ¶[0030]).
Regarding claims 10-14, 16-17, claims are rejected for being the systems comprising at least the same elements and performing at least the same functions performed by the systems of rejected claims 1-5, 7, 9 respectively (see rejections of claims 1-7, 9 above).
Regarding claims 18-19, claims are rejected for being the computer-program product embodied in a non-transitory computer readable medium that is stored in memory and that is programmed and executable by at least one controller in an audio system, the computer-program product comprising instructions to perform at least the same functions and comprise at least the same elements comprised in the systems of claims 1, 5, respectively (see rejections of claims 1, 5 above).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 6, 15, 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
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to AMMAR T HAMID whose telephone number is (571)272-1953. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9-5, Eastern time.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Vivian Chin can be reached at (571) 272-7848. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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AMMAR T. HAMID
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 2695
/AMMAR T HAMID/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2695