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 .
Priority
Should applicant desire to obtain the benefit of foreign priority under 35 U.S.C. 119(a)-(d) prior to declaration of an interference, a certified English translation of the foreign application must be submitted in reply to this action. 37 CFR 41.154(b) and 41.202(e).
Failure to provide a certified translation may result in no benefit being accorded for the non-English application.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 08/27/2024 has been made record of and considered by the examiner. The submission is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97.
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) 1-4, 11 and 12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shima (JP 2017153040 A) in view of Ramezani et al. (US 10956673 B1).
Regarding Claim 1, Shima teaches an information processing apparatus comprising: one or more memory devices that store a set of instructions; and one or more processors that execute the set of instructions to: acquire, from first data, first text data relating to text included in the first data, (¶0014 and 0016: discloses a character recognition unit that performs OCR on original image data and generates text data from the original image data) the first data being print data; convert the first data into second data, (¶0015: an image conversion unit changes the resolution of the image data and generates converted image data having a different solution) the second data being raster image data; acquire, from the second data, second text data relating to text included in the second data; (¶0016: performs character recognition on the converted image data and generates text data from the converted image data) the converted and compare the first text data and the second text data using text position information, and inspect whether the second data has an anomaly. (¶0016: compares the text data generated from the original image data with the text data generated from the converted image data, calculates a mismatch degree indicating a ratio of non-matching characters, and determines whether the mismatch degree is within a predetermined range.)
Shima is silent on the remaining limitations of Claim 1. However, Ramezani et al. teaches using text position information. (Col. 14 lines 19-53: teaches generating pairwise combinations of citation tokens in which spatial information related to the location of the citation tokens is embedded within the token pairs, wherein the spatial information may correspond to the degree of indentation or position of the token within page. Ramezani further teaches comparing pairs of citation tokens while incorporating the spatial information into the comparison process and determining relationships between the tokens and the embedded spatial information.)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to modify the comparison operation of Shima to utilize text position information as taught by Ramezani when comparing the first text data and the second text data. The motivation in doing so would have been to improve the correspondence between the text elements being compared and thereby improve the accuracy and reliability of mismatch detection, particularly in situations where formatting, layout changes, or image conversion operations may affect the relative arrangement of text within a document. Utilizing positional information when comparing recognized text would have predictably enhanced the ability of Shima’s system to identify corresponding text portions and reduce mismatch determinations.
Regarding claim 2, Shima and Ramezani do not explicitly teach the limitations of storing the inspection result in a storage unit; and displaying the inspection result on a display unit. However, examiner takes official notice to note that both storing and displaying detection results are well known and expected in the field of anomaly detection in optical character recognition. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to modify the combination of Shima and Ramezani to include the steps of storing and displaying detection results to achieve the benefits of enhanced user retrieval and inspection of the optical character recognition results.
Regarding claim 3, Shima and Ramezani do not explicitly teach the limitation of transmitting the inspection result to an external apparatus. However, examiner takes official notice to note that sending an inspection result to an external devise is well known and expected in the field of anomaly detection in optical character recognition. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to modify the combination of Shima and Ramezani to include the step of transmitting the inspection result to an external apparatus to achieve the benefits of enhanced dissemination of the optical character recognition results.
Regarding Claim 4, Shima teaches wherein the one or more processors execute instructions in the one or more memory devices to: search the second text data for text data having position information similar to position information of text of interest, for each text included in the first text data; and determine, when text data having position information similar to position information of the text of interest is found from the second text data, whether or not the text of the first text data and the corresponding text of the second text data match. (¶0014, 0016 and 0024: teaches an information processing apparatus configured to acquire first text data from the original image data and second text data from converted image data. Shima further teaches comparing the first text data and the second text data and determining a degree of mismatch indicating differences between two sets of text data. ¶0025: determines whether the mismatch degree is within a predetermined range to inspect whether the converted image data includes an anomaly.)
Shima is silent on the remaining limitations of Claim 4. However, Ramezani teaches search the second text data for text data having position information similar to position information of text of interest, for each text included in the first text data; and determine, when text data having position information similar to position information. (Col. 14 lines 19-53: discloses generating token mappings that associate tokens with portions of image data, where each token is associated with spatial information corresponding to a location or indentation position within a document. Ramezani further teaches incorporating spatial information into token pair representations and using such spatial information during comparison operations to determine the relationships between tokens.)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention to modify the comparison operation of Shima to utilize position information associated with recognized text, as taught by Ramezani, in order to identify corresponding text elements located at similar positions within the original and converted image data. Such modification would have predictably improved the accuracy of text correspondence determinations by ensuring text elements located in similar regions of the document are compared against each other rather than relying solely on global text matching.
Claim 11 recites a method with steps corresponding to the elements of the apparatus recited in Claim 1. Therefore, the recited steps of this claim are mapped to the proposed combination in the same manner as the corresponding elements in its corresponding apparatus claim. There for the rationale and motivation to combine the Shima and Ramezani et al references, presented in rejection of Claim 1, apply to this claim.
Claim 12 recites a computer-readable storage medium storing a program with instructions corresponding to the elements recited in Claim 1 and the steps recited in Claim 11. Therefore, the recited programming instructions of this claim are mapped to the proposed combination in the same manner as the corresponding elements in its corresponding apparatus claim and steps in its corresponding method claim. Additionally, the rationale and motivation to combine the Shima and Ramezani references, presented in rejection of Claim 1, apply to this claim.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 5-10 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 RAVEN S. JONES whose telephone number is (571)272-7759. The examiner can normally be reached M-Th 7:00a.m. - 5:00p.m..
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/RAVEN SIMONE JONES/Examiner, Art Unit 2665
/Stephen R Koziol/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2665
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