DETAILED ACTION
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid. Applicant's amendment submission filed on 01/12/2016 has been entered.
This Office Action is in response to the communication filed on 04/23/2026, wherein claims 1-20 have been examined and are pending.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) was submitted on 04/23/2026. The submission is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
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 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.
1. Claims 15-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Naletov et al. (U.S. 2014/0269927) hereinafter Naletov.
Claim 15 recites “A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising a bitstream that includes reference frame data and that is configured to be decoded by a processor that:…”
The limitation “configured to be decoded by a processor that…” is interpreted as intended use and does not further limit the claimed medium. That steps being claimed in the body of claim 15 are functional steps of a processor, not structural characteristics of the claimed bitstream. The claim does not require that the bitstream includes specific syntax elements or structural constraints that would distinguish over prior art.
The cited bitstream and its content, e.g. “reference frame data” constitute printed matter because they represent information. However, the recited decoding operations are performed by an external processor and are not tied to any specific structural arrangement of the bitstream itself. “To be given patentable weight, the printed matter and associated product must be in a functional relationship. A functional relationship can be found where the printed matter performs some function with respect to the product to which it is associated”. MPEP §2111.05(I)(A). When a claimed “computer-readable medium merely serves as a support for information or data, no functional relationship exists. MPEP §2111.05(III). The storage medium storing the claimed bitstream in claim 15 merely services as a support for the storage of the bitstream and provides no fictional relationship between the stored bitstream and storage medium. Therefor the structure bitstream, which scope is implied by the method steps, is non-functional descriptive material and given no patentable weight. MPEP §2111.05(III). Thus, the claim scope is just a storage medium storing bitstream data which include reference frame data that can be used in decoding and is anticipated by Naletov [0054], which recites a storage medium storing a bitstream and [0045], [0060], [0026], [0031], [0060] which discloses decoding encoded images (i.e. reference frame data in bitstream) and used previously decoded images as reference images for decoding of current image.
Claims 16-20 are rejected with similar reason as discussed in claim 15 above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-14 are allowed.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
In light of the specification, the Examiner finds the claimed invention to be patentably distinct from the prior art of record.
The prior arts of record, taken individually or in combination fail to explicitly teach or render obvious within the context of the claims the feature of reconstructing a first reference frame and a second reference frame for a current frame to be encoded or decoded; projecting motion vectors of the first reference frame and the second reference frame onto pixels of a current reference frame resulting in a first pixel in the current reference frame being associated with a plurality of projected motion vectors; selecting a first projected motion vector from the plurality of projected motion vectors as a selected motion vector associated with the first pixel to be used for determining a pixel value of the first pixel, the selection based on a weighting of respective ones of the plurality of projected motion vectors, the weighting based on magnitudes of the respective ones of the plurality of projected motion vectors; and predicting a value of the first pixel based on the first projected motion vector as cited in claims 1 and 10.
Claims 2-9 and 11-14 are allowable because they depend on allowable parent claims 1 and 10, respectively, as set forth above.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to KATHLEEN V NGUYEN whose telephone number is (571)270-0626. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F 9:00am-6:00pm.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Jamie Atala can be reached on 571-272-7384. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/KATHLEEN V NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2486
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