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 Objections
Claims 9 and 14-15 are objected to because of the following informalities:
Claims 9 and 14-15 recite 2D and 3D. The examiner suggests two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D).
Appropriate correction is required.
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.
Claim 15 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter.
Claim 15 describes “One or more computers and/or compute instances with a non-transitory machine-readable data carrier on which is stored a computer program including machine-readable instructions for generating…the instructions, when executed by the one or more computers and/or compute instances, causing the one or more computers and/or compute instances to perform the following steps”. The claimed “compute instances” are described only functionally and encompass generic software environment, such as virtual machine or virtualized processors. Such compute instances merely represent software programs and do not limit the claim to a particular machine or hardware structure. Further, the mere recitation of a non-transitory machine-readable data carrier does not transform the recited compute instances into structural hardware components. The claim therefore represents software per se, which is not statutory under 35 U.S.C. 101.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 9 and 14-15 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 101 and claim objections, set forth in this Office action.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
“ascertaining a deviation between the first camera and the second camera,
wherein the deviation specifies whether the first and second cameras see a same corresponding image point from the first image data for the projected and at least one voxel feature; and
adjusting at least one parameter of the ML model to minimize the ascertained deviation”
Wei et al. (SurroundOcc: Multi-Camera 3D Occupancy Prediction for Autonomous Driving, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Mar 2023) describes extract multi-scale features for each image adopt spatial 2D-3D attention to lift them to the 3D volume space. Then apply 3D convolutions to progressively upsample the volume features and impose supervision on multiple levels to obtain dense occupancy prediction; however, Wei et al. fails to teach “ascertaining a deviation between the first camera and the second camera, wherein the deviation specifies whether the first and second cameras see a same corresponding image point from the first image data for the projected and at least one voxel feature; and adjusting at least one parameter of the ML model to minimize the ascertained deviation”.
Caliskan et al. (Multi-View Consistency Loss for Improved Single-Image 3D Reconstruction of Clothed People, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2020) describes reconstruct a 3D voxel occupancy grid by comparing the predicted 3D volume against a 3D ground truth representation; however, Caliskan et al. fails to teach “ascertaining a deviation between the first camera and the second camera, wherein the deviation specifies whether the first and second cameras see a same corresponding image point from the first image data for the projected and at least one voxel feature; and adjusting at least one parameter of the ML model to minimize the ascertained deviation”.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to KYLE ZHAI whose telephone number is (571)270-3740. The examiner can normally be reached 9AM-5PM.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Ke Xiao can be reached at (571) 272 - 7776. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/KYLE ZHAI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2611
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