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 .
DETAILED ACTION
Claims 1-5, 8-9 and 11-18 are pending in this application [6/28/2024].
Claims 1-5 and 8-9 have been preliminary amended [6/28/2024].
Claims 6-7 and 10 have been preliminary cancelled [6/28/2024].
Claims 11-18 have been preliminary added [6/28/2024].
Drawings
The drawings received on 6/28/2024 are accepted for examination purposes.
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Applicant’s claim for the benefit of a prior-filed application under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) or under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c) is acknowledged.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 9/27/2024 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Specification
The title of the invention is not descriptive. A new title is required that is clearly indicative of the invention to which the claims are directed.
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) 1-2, 4-5, 8-9, 11, 13-15 and 17-18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Zhang et al. (US-2022/0261959) in view of Ren et al. (US-2025/0069247).
As to Claim 8, Zhang teaches ‘a video frame repair method, the video frame repair method comprises: acquiring a video frame group from a video to be fused, wherein the video frame group comprises a target video frame and video frames adjacent to the target video frame [Abstract, par 0047-0050 – video frame repair method for reconstructing a super-resolution method of video frames by acquiring a training sample set comprising a plurality of high resolution-low resolution video sequence pairs each comprising third consecutive video frames and a fourth video frame and inputting the third video frames into feature extraction subnetwork resulting in extracted features of the third video frames that it outputs]; inputting the video frame group into an attention transformation network to obtain a video frame group to be fused, wherein the attention transformation network comprises a set of attention transformation modules that are connected in series, an input of the attention transformation network is an input of a first attention transformation module in the set of attention transformation modules, and the video frame group to be fused comprises video frame that is output by one or more of the attention transformation modules and corresponds to the target video frame [par 0047-0064 – extracted features of the 2N+1 third video frames are input into the spatial-temporal non-local alignment subnetwork to obtain aligned extracted features of the 2N+1 third video frames and the aligned extracted features of the 2N+1 third video frames and the extracted feature of the intermediate frame of the 2N+1 third video frames are input into the attention progressive fusion subnetwork to obtain a first fused feature of the intermediate frame and the attention progressive fusion subnetwork comprises N_apf attention progressive fusion blocks connected in sequence, the N_apf attention progressive fusion blocks comprise a first attention progressive fusion block comprising 2N+2 first convolution layers, 2N+2 second convolution layers, and a temporal attention module]; and processing the video frame group to be fused to obtain a repaired target video frame [par 0065-0075 – superimposing obtained convolution results respectively corresponding to features of third video frames and features of intermediate frames, outputting each superimposed result]’.
Zhang does not disclose expressly ‘An electronic device, the electronic device comprising: one or more processors; a storage configured to store one or more programs; when executed by the one or more processors, the one or more programs cause the one or more processors; a video frame group from a video to be fused and the video frame group to be fused comprises video frame that is output by one or more of the attention transformation modules and corresponds to the target video frame’.
Ren in the proposed combination teaches ‘An electronic device, the electronic device comprising: one or more processors; a storage configured to store one or more programs; when executed by the one or more processors, the one or more programs cause the one or more processors; a video frame group from a video to be fused and the video frame group to be fused comprises video frame that is output by one or more of the attention transformation modules and corresponds to the target video frame [par 0029, 0039-0040, 0077-0080, 0098 – a video processing system including a processor, a memory and a motion compensator, a temporal attention subsystem receiving a plurality of video frames including a first video frame, a second video frame, and a third video frame which may represent successive frames (e.g., consecutive/adjacent frames) of a video sequence to fuse neighboring frames]’.
Zhang and Ren are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor, namely video frame processing methods. Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to include a video processing system fusing neighboring frames in a temporal attention subsystem, as taught by Ren. The motivation for doing so would have been to improving temporal consistency by fusing feature maps corresponding to a current video frame with feature maps corresponding to temporally-neighboring frames. Therefore, it would have been obvious to combine Ren with Zhang to obtain the invention as specified in claim 8.
Further, in regards to claim 1, the electronic device of claim 8 performs the video frame repair method of claim 1.
Further, in regards to claim 9, the video frame repair method of claim 1 is fully embodied on the non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 9.
As to Claims 2, 11 and 15, Zhang in the proposed combination teaches ‘in the attention transformation network, a video frame group output by a previous one of the attention transformation modules is an input of a subsequent one of the attention transformation modules; wherein, the video frame group output by the previous one of the attention transformation modules comprises: a video frame that is processed by the previous one of the attention transformation modules and corresponds to the target video frame, and a video frame that is processed by the previous one of the attention transformation modules and corresponds to the adjacent video frame [par 0047-0064 – extracted features of the 2N+1 third video frames are input into the spatial-temporal non-local alignment subnetwork to obtain aligned extracted features of the 2N+1 third video frames and the aligned extracted features of the 2N+1 third video frames and the extracted feature of the intermediate frame of the 2N+1 third video frames are input into the attention progressive fusion subnetwork to obtain a first fused feature of the intermediate frame and the attention progressive fusion subnetwork comprises N_apf attention progressive fusion blocks connected in sequence, the N_apf attention progressive fusion blocks comprise a first attention progressive fusion block comprising 2N+2 first convolution layers, 2N+2 second convolution layers, and a temporal attention module]’.
As to Claims 4, 13, and 17, Ren in the proposed combination teaches ‘wherein the target video frame and the adjacent video frames in the video frame group are all motion compensated video frames [par 0077-0080 – a motion compensator, a temporal attention subsystem receiving a plurality of video frames including a first video frame, a second video frame, and a third video frame which may represent successive frames (e.g., consecutive frames) of a video sequence]’.
Zhang and Ren are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor, namely video frame processing methods. Before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to include a video processing system fusing neighboring frames with a motion compensator in a temporal attention subsystem, as taught by Ren. The motivation for doing so would have been to improving temporal consistency by fusing feature maps corresponding to a current video frame with feature maps corresponding to temporally-neighboring frames. Therefore, it would have been obvious to combine Ren with Zhang to obtain the invention as specified in claims 4, 13 and 17.
As to Claims 5, 14 and 18, Zhang in the proposed combination teaches ‘processing the video frame group to be fused to obtain a repaired target video frame comprises: inputting the video frame group to be fused to a fusion network to obtain a fused video frame corresponding to the target video frame; and inputting the fused video frame to an image reconstruction network to obtain a repaired target video frame [par 0065-0075 – second fused feature of the intermediate frame and interpolated intermediate frame are superimposed to obtain a first output frame and updating the super-resolution reconstruction network to make first output frame converge to fourth video frame]’.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 3, 12 and 16 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: Zhang in view of Ren and further in view of the prior art searched and/or cited does not teach nor suggest the combination of limitations including “the process of processing the input video frame group by the attention transformation module comprises: dividing the target video frame and the adjacent video frames in the video frame group into a plurality of images blocks respectively; for an image block in the target video frame, performing global attention calculation with corresponding image block in the adjacent video frames; and splicing a plurality of image blocks that have been performed global attention calculation to obtain a processed video frame corresponding to the target video frame” as recited in dependent claims 3, 12 and 16.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record
a. US Publication No. 2022/0261959
b. US Publication No. 2025/0069247
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/MIYA J CATO/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2681
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