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 .
Applicant’s response to the last Office action dated 04/28/2026, as well as arguments and amendments made, filed 07/24/2026 have been entered and made of record.
Priority
Acknowledgement is made of Applicant’s claim of the present application being a continuation of PCT International Patent Application No. PCT/KR2022/011036, filed on July 27, 2022, and claim priority and benefit under 35 U.S.C. 119(a) to Korean Patent Application No. KR10-2022-0068512, filed on June 3, 2022, and Korean Patent Application No. KR10-2022-0007985, filed on January 19, 2022. It appears that the priority document for Korean Patent Application No. KR10-2022-0007985 that has been retrieved, is incorrect (a presentation rather than a Korean Patent document).
Status of Claims
Claims 1-9, 11-19, and 21-22 are pending. Claims 10 and 20 are cancelled.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments, with respect to the title objection, have been fully considered and are persuasive. The title objection has been withdrawn.
Applicant’s arguments with respect to the rejections of claims 1, 11, and 21 under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been fully considered. The amendments to claims 1, 11, and 21 have altered the scope of the claims, and therefore, has initiated the following new ground(s) of rejection. The new analyses presented below render these arguments moot.
Applicant’s arguments with respect to the rejections of claims 3 and 13 under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been fully considered. The amendments to claims 1 and 11 have altered the scope of claim 3, and therefore, has initiated the following new ground(s) of rejection. The new analyses presented below render these arguments moot.
Applicant’s arguments with respect to the rejections of claims 7, 17, and 22 under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been fully considered and are persuasive. The rejections of claims 7, 17, and 22 under 35 U.S.C. 103 have been withdrawn. THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL.
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)(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.
Claims 1, 2, 11, 12, and 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Ujiie et al. (“Interpolation-based Object Detection Using Motion Vectors for Embedded Real-time Tracking Systems”).
Regarding claim 1, Ujiie teaches, “An image processing method of an image processing device, the image processing method comprising: detecting object data of an object from first image frames, among image frames input from an image sensor, at predetermined intervals according to an object detection rate which is lower than a frame rate of the image sensor;” (Ujiie, Pg. 2, Para. 3 discloses; “When I-frame exists for every N frames in the video stream, the detection frequency using CNN can be reduced to 1/N of the naive approach in which CNN is used for every frame to realize MOT.” The detection frequency (or rate) is lower than the frame rate of image sensor.) “estimating object data from second image frames other than the first image frames among the image frames input from the image sensor, based on the object data of the first image frames;” (Ujiie, Pg. 2, Para. 3 discloses; “For P-frames, which are compressed and decompressed using the preceding frame, MVint performs low complexity interpolation using the detection results of I-frames, thereby eliminates computationally intensive CNN-based detection while the tracking performance is well maintained.” The P-frames use the detection result of the I-frames (based on the object data of the first image frames) to interpolate (or estimate) object data.) “and encoding the image frames input from the image sensor at an encoding frame rate that is equal to the frame rate of the image sensor, based on the detected object data and the estimated object data.” (Ujiie, Figure 3 shows all of the input frames being encoded, thus the encoding rate and imaging frame rate are the same. Ujiie, Pg. 3, Para. 1 discloses; “Each frame is divided into small regions (e.g. 16 × 16) named macroblocks, for which the encoding and decoding processes are conducted.” Ujiie, Fig. 3 caption discloses; “Each frame in the video sequence is encoded by one of the three frame types: I frame, P-frame, and B-frame.” Examiner interprets that the encoding of the I-frames are based on the detected object data, and the encoding of the P-frames and B-frames are based on the interpolated (estimated) object data. Thus, the encoding is based on the detected and estimated object data.)
Regarding claim 2, Ujiie teaches, “The image processing method of claim 1, wherein each of the detected object data and the estimated object data comprises: a position of a region of interest comprising the object; and a size of the region of interest.” (Ujiie, Pg. 4, Section 5.1, Para. 1 discloses; “Outputs of the trackers are the sizes, positions, and IDs of the bounding boxes for each frame.” Since every frame has detected or estimated object data, both types of object data will have object position and size.)
Claim 11 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in claim 1. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped in the same manner as the corresponding elements in its corresponding method claim. Ujiie also discloses a processor (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”). Therefore, claim 11 is rejected in the same manner as claim 1.
Claim 12 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in claim 2. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped in the same manner as the corresponding elements in its corresponding method claim. Ujiie also discloses a processor (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”). Therefore, claim 12 is rejected in the same manner as claim 2.
Claim 21 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in claim 1. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped in the same manner as the corresponding elements in its corresponding method claim. Ujiie also discloses a processor, image sensor, and memory (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”). Therefore, claim 21 is rejected in the same manner as claim 1.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
Claims 3 and 13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ujiie et al., in view of Pan et al. (US 2025/0218140 A1 w/ EFD of 06/01/2020).
Regarding claim 3, Ujiie does not explicitly teach, “The image processing method of claim 1, wherein the estimating of the object data comprises: based on a determination that a timestamp of a current image frame does not correspond with a timestamp of the detected object data, estimating object data of the current image frame, based on at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame.” Since Ujiie does not explicitly disclose these limitations, Examiner relies on the teachings of Pan in an analogous filed of endeavor. Specifically, Pan teaches, “The image processing method of claim 1, wherein the estimating of the object data comprises: based on a determination that a timestamp of a current image frame does not correspond with a timestamp of the detected object data, estimating object data of the current image frame, based on at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame.” (Pan, Para. [0019] discloses; “The IMU pose may also be determined as an interpolated value between two IMU pose values having timestamps adjacent to a timestamp of the pose estimate.”)
Ujiie and Pan are considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because they are in the same field of object detection in videos. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Ujiie to incorporate the teachings of Pan in order to estimate object data if the timestamp of the frame does not align with a timestamp of detected object data. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the previously described method of Ujiie with the teachings of Pan to reduce energy used and keep accuracy (Ujiie, Abstract discloses; “With the computational intensiveness due to repeated convolutions, they consume large amount of power, making them difficult to apply in power-constrained embedded platforms. In this work, we present MVint, a power-efficient detection and tracking framework. MVint combines motion-vector-based interpolator and CNN-based detector to simultaneously achieve high accuracy and energy efficiency by utilizing motion vectors obtained inexpensively in the environments wherein encoding is conducted at the cameras.”). Accordingly, it would have been obvious to combine Ujiie and Pan to obtain claim 3.
Claim 13 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in Claim 3. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped to the proposed combination in the same manner as the corresponding steps in its corresponding method claim. Additionally, the rationale and motivation to combine the Ujiie and Pan references, presented in rejection of Claim 3, apply to this claim. Finally, the combination of Ujiie and Pan references discloses a processor (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”).
Claims 4-5 and 14-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ujiie et al., in view of Pan et al., in further view of Oami (US 2022/0180536 A1).
Regarding claim 4, the combination of Ujiie and Pan does not explicitly teach, “The image processing method of claim 3, wherein the estimating of the object data further comprises: based on the at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame, determining a past object move vector according to a movement of the object, and when the object is moving according to the past object move vector, estimating object data of the current image frame, based on the past object move vector and a weight parameter based on a time difference between the current image frame and the at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame.”. Since the combination of Ujiie and Pan does not explicitly disclose these limitations, Examiner relies on the teachings of Oami in an analogous field of endeavor. Specifically, Oami discloses, “The image processing method of claim 3, wherein the estimating of the object data further comprises: based on the at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame, determining a past object move vector according to a movement of the object” (Oami, Para. [0116] discloses; “In a case where a linear motion model is used, the prediction unit 430 adds a motion vector to a position in a previous frame to predict the current position.”) “and when the object is moving according to the past object move vector, estimating object data of the current image frame, based on the past object move vector and a weight parameter based on a time difference between the current image frame and the at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame.” (Oami, Para. [0116] discloses; “In a case where a linear motion model is used, the prediction unit 430 adds a motion vector to a position in a previous frame to predict the current position. In a case where the time intervals are not equal, the motion vector is expanded or contracted in consideration of the change in time difference, and then added.”)
Ujiie, Pan, and Oami are all considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because they are in the same field of object detection in videos. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the combination of Ujiie and Pan to incorporate the teachings of Oami in order to add a motion vector to a previous frame so that an estimation can be made. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the previously described methods of Ujiie and Pan with the teachings of Oami to give the system the ability to predict object data based on a difference in time and how the object was moving previously. Accordingly, it would have been obvious to combine Ujiie, Pan, and Oami to obtain claim 4.
Regarding claim 5, the combination of Ujiie, Pan, and Oami teaches, “The image processing method of claim 3, wherein the estimating of the object data further comprises: based on the at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame, determining a past object move vector according to a movement of the object” (Oami, Para. [0116] discloses; “In a case where a linear motion model is used, the prediction unit 430 adds a motion vector to a position in a previous frame to predict the current position.”) “and when the object is not moving according to the past object move vector, estimating object data of the current image frame, based on the at least one previous object data detected before the current image frame.” (Oami, Para. [0115] discloses; “The prediction unit 430 predicts the position of the object in the current frame from the position of the object in the past on the basis of each motion model for each object to be tracked.” Oami discloses that the prediction unit can use previous positions (object data) to estimate current position (object data). This is interpreted to be used when there is no linear motion model used (i.e. no motion vector).) The proposed combination as well as the motivation for combining the Ujiie, Pan, and Oami references in the rejection of claim 4, apply to claim 5 and are incorporated herein by reference. Thus, the method recited in claim 5 is met by Ujiie, Pan, and Oami.
Claim 14 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in Claim 4. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped to the proposed combination in the same manner as the corresponding steps in its corresponding method claim. Additionally, the rationale and motivation to combine the Ujiie, Pan, and Oami references, presented in rejection of Claim 4, apply to this claim. Finally, the combination of Ujiie, Pan, and Oami references discloses a processor (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”).
Claim 15 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in Claim 5. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped to the proposed combination in the same manner as the corresponding steps in its corresponding method claim. Additionally, the rationale and motivation to combine the Ujiie, Pan, and Oami references, presented in rejection of Claim 4, apply to this claim. Finally, the combination of Ujiie, Pan, and Oami references discloses a processor (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”).
Claims 6 and 16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ujiie et al., in view of Lin (US 2008/0240250 A1).
Regarding claim 6, Ujiie does not explicitly teach, “The image processing method of claim 2, wherein the encoding the image frames comprises controlling a quantization parameter and a bit rate.” Since Ujiie does not explicitly disclose this limitation, Examiner relies on the teachings of Lin in an analogous filed of endeavor. Specifically, Lin teaches, “The image processing method of claim 2, wherein the encoding the image frames comprises controlling a quantization parameter and a bit rate.” (Lin, Abstract discloses; “Quality settings established by an encoder are adjusted based on information associated with regions of interest ("ROIs"). For example, quantization step sizes can be reduced (to improve quality) or increased (to reduce bit rate).”)
Ujiie and Lin are all considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because they are in the same field of processing objects in imaging frames. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Ujiie to incorporate the teachings of Lin in order to add a quantization parameter and bit rates for image quality. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to combine the previously described methods of Ujiie with the teachings of Lin to have the ability to control the quality of the images by utilizing the quantization parameters and bit rates. Accordingly, it would have been obvious to combine Ujiie and Lin to obtain claim 6.
Claim 16 recites a system with elements corresponding to the steps recited in Claim 6. Therefore, the recited elements of this claim are mapped to the proposed combination in the same manner as the corresponding steps in its corresponding method claim. Additionally, the rationale and motivation to combine the Ujiie and Lin references, presented in rejection of Claim 6, apply to this claim. Finally, the combination of Ujiie and Lin references discloses a processor (Ujiie, Pg. 6, Section 6.1, Para. 1 discloses; “This system consists of a multicore processor with a main memory, some specialized coprocessors to compute CNN for detection, an output display, and an input webcam with a video codec encoder.”).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 7-9, 17-19, and 22 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
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JUSTIN M. OAKES whose telephone number is (571)272-9379. The examiner can normally be reached 7:30am-5pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Amandeep Saini can be reached at (571) 272-3382. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/JUSTIN M OAKES/Examiner, Art Unit 2662
/AMANDEEP SAINI/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2662
