DETAILED ACTION
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 .
This communication is in response to Application No. 18/822,416 filed 09/02/2024. Claim 1 is pending.
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers submitted under 35. U.S.C 119(a)-(d), which papers have been placed of record in the file.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement(s) (IDS) submitted on 09/02/2024 has been entered and considered. Initialed copies of the PTO-1449 by the examiner are attached.
Drawings
The drawings are objected to under 37 CFR 1.83(a) because they fail to show a flow chart or diagram, in which chronological steps are illustrated to obtain a recognition of waste household appliances using RBG images and Generative Adversarial network as described in the specification. Any structural detail that is essential for a proper understanding of the disclosed invention should be shown in the drawing. MPEP § 608.02(d). Corrected drawing sheets in compliance with 37 CFR 1.121(d) are required in reply to the Office action to avoid abandonment of the application. Any amended replacement drawing sheet should include all of the figures appearing on the immediate prior version of the sheet, even if only one figure is being amended. The figure or figure number of an amended drawing should not be labeled as “amended.” If a drawing figure is to be canceled, the appropriate figure must be removed from the replacement sheet, and where necessary, the remaining figures must be renumbered and appropriate changes made to the brief description of the several views of the drawings for consistency. Additional replacement sheets may be necessary to show the renumbering of the remaining figures. Each drawing sheet submitted after the filing date of an application must be labeled in the top margin as either “Replacement Sheet” or “New Sheet” pursuant to 37 CFR 1.121(d). If the changes are not accepted by the examiner, the applicant will be notified and informed of any required corrective action in the next Office action. The objection to the drawings will not be held in abeyance.
Specification
The disclosure is objected to because of the following informalities:
The specification does not include any paragraph numbering. As described in MPEP 608.01, the specification “should be individually and consecutively numbered using Arabic numerals, so as to unambiguously identify each paragraph. The number should consist of at least four numerals enclosed in square brackets, including leading zeros (e.g., [0001]). The numbers and enclosing brackets should appear to the right of the left margin as the first item in each paragraph, before the first word of the paragraph, and should be highlighted in bold. A gap, equivalent to approximately four spaces, should follow the number.”
Equation (9) is blurry and illegible to understand.
On Page 5, the term “VLAN” should be changed to “(VLAN)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 5, the term “QoS” should be changed to “(QoS)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 6, the term “HTTP” should be changed to “(HTTP)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 6, the term “MFNet” should be changed to “(MFNet)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 7, the term “MiDaS” should be changed to “(MiDaS)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 8, the term “HMSI-c” should be changed to “(HMSI-c)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 8, the term “ReLU” should be changed to “(ReLU)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
On Page 8, the term “FTP” should be changed to “(FTP)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time, they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity.
Appropriate correction is required.
The use of the term(s) Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch, Dell PowerEdge server, Linux operating system, Seagate BarraCuda 4TB internal hard disk drive, Dell computer and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPU, which are a trade name or a mark used in commerce, has been noted in this application. The term should be accompanied by the generic terminology; furthermore, the term should be capitalized wherever it appears or, where appropriate, include a proper symbol indicating use in commerce such as ™, SM , or ® following the term. The term(s) should be revised to this format:
Cisco® Catalyst® 2960 switch, DELL PowerEdge™ server, Linux® operating system, Seagate® BarraCuda® 4TB internal hard disk drive, DELL® computer and NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2080Ti GPU.
Although the use of trade names and marks used in commerce (i.e., trademarks, service marks, certification marks, and collective marks) are permissible in patent applications, the proprietary nature of the marks should be respected and every effort made to prevent their use in any manner which might adversely affect their validity as commercial marks.
Claim Objections
Claim 1 is objected to because of the following informalities:
At lines 3, 5, 11, 54, 61, 94 and 124 recite a numbering as means to identify subsections of the claim. However, the claim should avoid using numbers as a list as it causes clarity issues to avoid 112(b) rejection(s).
At line 13, the terms “VLAN” and “QoS” should be changed to “(VLAN)” and “(QoS)”, respectively, along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity and prevent a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph issues since the specification is not clear on describing the meaning.
At line 25 should recite, in part, “the generative adversarial network model” to avoid typographical and/or clarity issues.
At line 28, the term “MFNet” should be changed to “(MFNet)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity and prevent a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph issues since the specification is not clear on describing the meaning.
At line 46 should recite, in part, “RGB images are sent” to avoid typographical and/or clarity issues.
At line 48, the term “MiDaS” should be changed to “(MiDaS)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity and prevent a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph issues since the specification is not clear on describing the meaning.
At line 63, the term “HMSI-c” should be changed to “(HMSI-c)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity and prevent a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph issues since the specification is not clear on describing the meaning.
At line 95, should recite in part, “complementary network:” to avoid typographical and/or clarity issues.
At line 110 recites equation (9) which is blurry and illegible to understand.
At line 116, the words have an increased distance of spacing between them and should be corrected to avoid typographical and/or clarity issues.
At line 71, the term “ReLU” should be changed to “(ReLU)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity and prevent a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph issues since the specification is not clear on describing the meaning.
At line 126, the term “FTP” should be changed to “(FTP)” along with the meanings of the acronym as acronyms must be presented with their meanings the first time they are mentioned in order to enhance clarity and prevent a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph issues since the specification is not clear on describing the meaning.
At line 129 should recite a semicolon instead of a comma after the word “appliances” to avoid typographical and/or clarity issues.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
The claims are generally narrative and indefinite, failing to conform with current U.S. practice. They appear to be a literal translation into English from a foreign document and are replete with grammatical and idiomatic errors. Moreover, Claim 1 lacks clarity as to what is exactly being claimed. It is unclear what method/process applicant is intending to encompass. Applicant is reminded that proper correction is required.
Claim 1 recites the limitations:
At line 8, recites in part, “the dataset”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the term “dataset” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 11, recites in part, “Cat5e network cable”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “Cat5e network cable” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 11, recites in part, “the Ethernet interface”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “Ethernet interface” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At lines 12-13, recites in part, “the Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 13, recites in part, “the switch port”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “switch port” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 14 recites in part, “the data stream”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “data stream” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At lines 14-15, recites in part, “the Dell PowerEdge server interface”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “Dell PowerEdge server interface” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 17 recites in part, “the HTTP communication protocol”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “HTTP communication protocol” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At lines 18-19 recites in part, “the Linux operating system”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “Linux operating system” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At lines 19-20 recites in part, “the generative adversarial network model”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “generative adversarial network model” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At lines 22-23 recites in part, “the Seagate BarraCuda 4TB internal hard disk drive”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “Seagate BarraCuda 4TB internal hard disk drive” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 28 recites in part, “the MFNet dataset”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “MFNet datset” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At lines 39-40 recites in part, “the loss function”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “loss function” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 48 recites in part, “the MiDaS dataset”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “MiDaS dataset” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 61 recites in part, “the hierarchical multi-source data”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “hierarchical multi-source data” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 75 recites in part, “the eigenvalue”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the term “eigenvalue” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 78 recites in part, “the spatial attention mechanism”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the terms “spatial attention mechanism” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
At line 108 recites in part, “the cross-entropy loss function”. However, there is insufficient antecedent basis for the term “cross-entropy loss function” as it was not previously recited anywhere in the claim.
Claim 1 contains the trademark/trade names: Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch, Dell PowerEdge server, Linux operating system, Seagate BarraCuda 4TB internal hard disk drive, Dell computer and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPU. Where a trademark or trade name is used in a claim as a limitation to identify or describe a particular material or product, the claim does not comply with the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, second paragraph. See Ex parte Simpson, 218 USPQ 1020 (Bd. App. 1982). The claim scope is uncertain since the trademark or trade name cannot be used properly to identify any particular material or product. A trademark or trade name is used to identify a source of goods, and not the goods themselves. Thus, a trademark or trade name does not identify or describe the goods associated with the trademark or trade name. In the present case, the trademark/trade name is used to identify/describe:
line 12 should contain trademark symbol as Cisco® Catalyst® 2960 switch.
line 15 should contain trademark symbol as DELL PowerEdge™ server.
line 19 should contain trademark symbol as Linux® operating system.
line 22 should contain trademark symbol as Seagate® BarraCuda® 4TB internal hard disk drive.
line 126 should contain trademark symbol as DELL® computer.
lines 127-128 should contain trademark symbol as NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2080Ti GPU.
and, accordingly, the identification/description is indefinite.
Claim 1 recites the limitation “the PyTorch deep learning framework” in line 19. The office finds the terms “PyTorth deep learning framework” unclear, rendering the claim indefinite. It is not clear what the applicant refers to when reciting “the PyTorch deep learning framework” as it is not clearly defined in the claim and silent in the specification. It is not readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art to ascertain the metes and bounds of the claim as the terms “the PyTorch deep learning framework” were not previously recited anywhere in the claim, nor defined for that matter, rendering the claim indefinite.
Claims 1 recites the limitation “a generative adversarial network model” in lines 48-49. The office finds the terms “a generative adversarial network model” unclear, rendering the claim indefinite. It is not clear what the applicant refers to as “a generative adversarial network model”, whether it is a new generative adversarial network model or one previously referred to in line 27.
Claims 1 recites the limitation “constructing the hierarchical multi-source data interaction model in the server, a hierarchical multi-source data interaction model is constructed” in lines 61-63. The office finds the terms “hierarchical multi-source data interaction model” unclear, rendering the claim indefinite. It is not clear what the applicant refers to when stating “the hierarchical multi-source data interaction model”, as it seems as two separate hierarchical multi-source data are being constructed: one residing in the server and another separate from the server.
Claims 1 recites the limitation “according to the loss function, the multi-source data fusion model is trained” in lines 117-118. The office finds the terms “the loss function” unclear, rendering the claim indefinite. It is not clear what the applicant refers to as “the loss function”, whether it is a new loss function or one previously referred to in lines 39-40 and 108.
Claims 1 recites the limitation “the model consists of 5 modules, which are HMSI-c, c= 1, 2, 3, 4, 5” in lines 63-64. The office finds the terms “HMSI-c” unclear, rendering the claim indefinite. The specification is silent on the definition of the term and impairs examination process. Furthermore, the terms “c= 1, 2, 3, 4, 5” appear to be numerical values, yet remain undefined as these could be positive or negative integers and no meaning is recited
Claim 1 recites the limitation of equation (2) at line 69 which includes a formula. The office finds the terms “C” in the formula unclear, rendering the claim indefinite. It is not clear what the applicant refers to in equation (2) with respect to the term “C” in it, as the limitations recited before state numerical values of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and additionally define C as a module. It is not readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art to ascertain the metes and bounds of the claim as the term “C” in equation (2) remains indefinite.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Zhang et al. (CN117315361A) - home appliance recycling image classification by automatically identifying and classifying recycling images to improve the recycling efficiency by obtaining an initial image, the initial image including a variety of common household appliance images; preprocessing the initial image to obtain an image data set, and dividing it into a training set according to the image data set Test set and verification set; an image classification model is constructed based on a deep convolutional neural network.
Kim (US 20240265503 A1) - a neural processing unit (NPU) for image fusion and to an artificial neural network (ANN) system for image fusion; wherein the image fusion ANN model may be configured to apply a weight to emphasize at least one characteristic that can be determined from the first image and at least one characteristic that can be determined from a second image and configured to input only RGB values of a first image or a brightness value of each pixel of the first image; The image fusion ANN model may further trained based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) structure.
Lu et al. (“An Alternative of LiDAR in Nighttime: Unsupervised Depth Estimation Based on Single Thermal Image”, 2021) – a framework to estimate the scene depth directly from a single thermal image that can still observe the scene in the low lighting condition by learning thermal image depth estimation framework together with RGB cameras.
Tan et al. (“Single-Image Depth Inference Using Generative Adversarial Networks”, 2019) – estimates per-pixel depths from a single RGB input image using a generative adversarial network.
Li et al. (US 20240135672 A1) – image generation system implements a multi-branch GAN to generate images that each express visually similar content in a different modality; outputs from each of the fidelity discriminators and the consistency discriminator are used to compute a non-saturating GAN loss. The non-saturating GAN loss is used to refine parameters of the multi-branch GAN during training until model convergence. The trained multi-branch GAN generates multiple images from a single input.
Wang et al. (“Research on image segmentation algorithm based on multimodal hierarchical attention mechanism and genetic neural network”, 2022) – multimodal hierarchical attention mechanism and genetic neural network of image segmentation.
Zhang et al. (“Object Tracking in RGB-T Videos Using Modal-Aware Attention Network and Competitive Learning”, 2019) – Object tracking in RGB-thermal (RGB-T) algorithm based on a modal-aware attention network and competitive learning (MaCNet) includes a feature extraction network, modal-aware attention network, and classification network.
Lee et al. (WO2024162581A1) - image generating technology using an adversarial attention network system in which a converted image may be reconstructed by using an attention sharing mechanism between domains during an image conversion process, and a more consistent and realistic output may be generated.
Miron et al. (US 20230055538 A1) – training a generative model for obtaining a trained generator model for generating generated raw depth map data items from the synthetic dense depth map data items; The synthetic RGBD data include a generated image pixel map (RGB image) and depth information for each of the pixels (depth map); training of the GAN model is made using a min-max optimization based on a discriminator loss further considering a marginal preservation loss.
Inquiries
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to EMMANUEL SILVA-AVINA whose telephone number is (571)270-0729. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday 11 AM - 8 PM EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Chineyere Wills-Burns can be reached at (571) 272-9752. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/EMMANUEL SILVA-AVINA/Examiner, Art Unit 2673
/CHINEYERE WILLS-BURNS/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2673
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