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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 10/29/2024 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
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.
Claim(s) 1-6, 9-10, 16-19, and 22-25 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ray et al (US20210319595) in view of Flynn et al (US20210004992).
Regarding claim 1, Ray teaches a method of encoding geometrical information of a geometry of a point cloud into a bitstream (para. [0021], In general, data source 104 represents a source of data (i.e., raw, unencoded point cloud data) and may provide a sequential series of “frames”) of the data to G-PCC encoder 200, which encodes data for the frames), the point cloud being represented by a plurality of cuboid volumes (para. [0035], The bounding box may be split into multiple cube/cuboid regions, which may be called tiles; para. [0038], For Category 1 data, the compressed geometry is typically represented by a pruned octree (i.e., an octree from the root down to a leaf level of blocks larger than voxels) plus a model that approximates the surface within each leaf of the pruned octree), an occupied cuboid volume being modelled by one or more triangles (para. [0038], The surface model used is a triangulation comprising 1-10 triangles per block, resulting in a triangle soup), at least one triangle having at least one respective vertex on an edge of the occupied cuboid volume (para. [0061], Geometry is represented within each cube as a surface that intersects each edge of the cube at most once. Since there are 12 edges of a cube, there can be at most 12 such intersections within a cube. Each such intersection is called a vertex), and the geometrical information comprising vertex positions of one or more vertices (para. [0069]), the method comprising for a vertex on a current edge (para. [0067]):
constructing contextual information based on at least one of:
occupancy information of neighboring cuboid volumes that about the current edge (para. [0039], Within each neighborhood, the occupancy of a node and/or its children may be used to predict the occupancy of the current node or its children; para. [0062]), or
vertex positional information of already-coded neighboring edges of the current edge, the neighboring edges being edges having a point in common with the current edge (para. [0063], [0069]-[0070]); and
encoding, by an entropy coder, a vertex position of the vertex on the current edge (para. [0062], Arithmetic encoding unit 214 may entropy encode the segment indicators and the vertex positions).
Ray fails to teach using the contextual information to select a coding probability of an entropy coder; and
encoding by the entropy coder and using the selected coding probability.
However Flynn teaches select a coding probability of an entropy coder (para. [0027], A probability distribution is selected from among a plurality of probability distributions based on occupancy data for a plurality of nodes neighboring the current node); and
encoding by the entropy coder and using the selected coding probability (para. [0027], The encoder entropy encodes the occupancy pattern based on the selected probability distribution to produce encoded data for the bitstream and updates the selected probability distribution).
Therefore taking the combined teachings of Ray and Flynn as a whole, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was filed to incorporate the steps of Flynn into the method of Ray. The motivation to combine Flynn and Ray would be to improve entropy encoding of point clouds (para. [0001] of Flynn).
Regarding claim 2, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 1 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above. Furthermore, Ray teaches a decoder (300 in fig. 1 and para. [0020] of Ray).
Regarding claim 3, the modified invention of Ray teaches a method wherein constructing the contextual information is based on at least one of:
a count of all occupied neighboring cuboid volumes belonging to a subset of neighboring cuboid volumes (para. [0027] of Flynn, A probability distribution is selected from among a plurality of probability distributions based on occupancy data for a plurality of nodes neighboring the current node; para. [0090] of Flynn, a semi-sparsely populated distribution (total number of occupied nodes among current node and sibling nodes ≤3)), or
whether or not all neighboring cuboid volumes belonging to a subset of neighboring cuboid volumes are occupied (para. [0088] of Flynn, For example separate distributions may be used for patterns corresponding to fully occupied, vertically-oriented, horizontally-oriented, mostly empty, and then all other cases; para. [0090] of Flynn, a decision tree that assesses whether the pattern corresponds to a full node (e.g. pattern=255)),
wherein the subset of neighboring cuboid volumes comprises at least one of:
neighboring cuboid volumes sharing the current edge (para. [0061] of Ray, detect a vertex along an edge if and only if there is at least one occupied voxel adjacent to the edge among all cubes that share the edge; para. [0081] of Flynn, It will be appreciated that the neighbour definition may be broadened to include neighbouring nodes based on a shared edge or based on a shared vertex to include additional adjacent sub-volumes in the assessment),
neighboring cuboid volumes having a corner as a start point of the current edge (para. [0077] of Flynn, In a broader definition, nodes are neighboring if they share at least one edge. In yet a broader definition, two nodes are neighboring if they share at least one vertex; para. [0082] of Flynn),
neighboring cuboid volumes having a corner as an end point of the current edge (para. [0077] of Flynn, In a broader definition, nodes are neighboring if they share at least one edge. In yet a broader definition, two nodes are neighboring if they share at least one vertex; para. [0082] of Flynn).
Regarding claim 4, the modified method of Ray teaches a method wherein constructing the contextual information is based on at least one of:
values of already-coded presence flag associated with the neighboring edges of the current edge (para. [0066]-[0067 of Ray),
positions of vertices on the already-coded neighboring edges of the current edge (para. [0069] of Ray),
a count of vertices on the already-coded neighboring edges of the current edge and having a distance from the current edge that is below a predefined threshold, or
a count of vertices on the already-coded neighboring edges of the current edge and having a distance from the current edge that is within a predefined interval.
Regarding claim 5, the modified method of Ray teaches a method wherein constructing the contextual information is based on:
a number of neighboring edges (para. [0048] of Ray, count a number of edges of a cube of the point cloud data comprising a vertex) for which the already-coded presence flag is true, and on a number of neighboring edges (k′) for which the already-coded presence flag is false (para. [0070] of Ray, However, for each unique edge, G-PCC encoder 200 may signal whether the edge contains a vertex (e.g., the intersection point of trisoup geometry and the edge) or not (e.g., no such intersection) as the segment_indicator. A segment_indicator with a value of 1, indicates that edge contains vertex, and a segment_indicator with a value of 0 indicates that edge does not contain a vertex), or
the number of neighboring edges (para. [0048] of Ray, count a number of edges of a cube of the point cloud data comprising a vertex) for which the already-coded presence flag is false (para. [0070] of Ray, However, for each unique edge, G-PCC encoder 200 may signal whether the edge contains a vertex (e.g., the intersection point of trisoup geometry and the edge) or not (e.g., no such intersection) as the segment_indicator. A segment_indicator with a value of 1, indicates that edge contains vertex, and a segment_indicator with a value of 0 indicates that edge does not contain a vertex).
Regarding claim 6, the modified method of Ray teaches a method wherein constructing the contextual information comprises quantizing the position of the vertices (para. [0062] of Ray, In a second step, for each segment that contains a vertex, G-PCC encoder 200 may be configured to apply a uniformly scalar quantizer to the position of the vertex along the segment to obtain a small number of levels. This number is typically equal to the cube size if the geometric spatial resolution is desired to approximate the voxel resolution) on the already-coded neighboring edges to be coarser than an accuracy with which the position of the vertices on the already-coded neighboring edges are coded into the bitstream (para. [0035] of Ray, the positions of one or more points may be quantized based on the precision; para. [0050] of Ray, RAHT unit 218 and lifting unit 222 may generate coefficients based on the attributes. Coefficient quantization unit 224 may quantize the coefficients generated by RAHT unit 218 or lifting unit 222. Arithmetic encoding unit 226 may apply arithmetic coding to syntax elements representing the quantized coefficients. G-PCC encoder 200 may output these syntax elements in an attribute bitstream).
Regarding claim 9, the modified method of Ray teaches a method wherein, for selecting the coding probability of the entropy coder, the method uses
an optimal binary coder with update on the fly (OBUF) mechanism, or
a context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) mechanism (para. [0052] of Ray; para. [0061] of Flynn).
Regarding claim 10, the modified method of Ray teaches a method wherein the point cloud is modeled using the TriSoup coding scheme (para. [0003] of Ray).
Regarding claim 16, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 3 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 17, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 4 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 18, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 5 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 19, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 6 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 22, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 9 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 23, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 10 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 24, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 1 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Regarding claim 25, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 2 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Claim(s) 7 and 20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ray et al (US20210319595) and Flynn et al (US20210004992) in view of Van der Auwera et al (US20210407143).
Regarding claim 7, the modified method of Ray teaches a method wherein
the vertex position is represented by one or more bits (para. [0069] of Ray).
The modified method of Ray fails to teach wherein the contextual information is constructed for each bit of the vertex position, and
each bit of the vertex position is encoded/decoded of by a binary entropy coder using a coding probability as determined based on the contextual information for the respective bit.
However Van der Auwera teaches wherein contextual information is constructed for each bit of a vertex position (para. [0028], determine a context and use the context in arithmetic coding (e.g., CABAC coding) of one or more bits of a point offset syntax element indicating the point offset), and
each bit of the vertex position is encoded/decoded of by a binary entropy coder (para. [0028], CABAC coding; para. [0241]) using a coding probability as determined based on the contextual information for the respective bit (para. [0058], The coding context may identify probabilities of bins having particular values. For instance, a coding context may indicate a 0.7 probability of coding a 0-valued bin and a 0.3 probability of coding a 1-valued bin).
Therefore taking the combined teachings of Ray and Flynn with Van der Auwera as a whole, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was filed to incorporate the steps of Van der Auwera into the method of Ray and Flynn. The motivation to combine Van der Auwera, Flynn and Ray would be to decrease hardware implementation costs and/or accelerate processes for encoding and decoding point cloud data (para. [0004] of Van der Auwera).
Regarding claim 20, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 7 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Claim(s) 8 and 21 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ray et al (US20210319595), Flynn et al (US20210004992) and Van der Auwera et al (US20210407143) in view of Karczewicz et al (WO2013/154866A1).
Regarding claim 8, the modified method of Ray fails to teach a method wherein the contextual information for a bit of the vertex position is further constructed based on a precedingly coded bit.
However Karczewicz teaches wherein contextual information for a bit (para. [0008]) is further constructed based on a precedingly coded bit (para. [0035]-[0036]). It would be obvious to apply the steps to the vertex position of Ray (para. [0069] of Ray).
Therefore taking the combined teachings of Ray, Flynn and Van der Auwera with Karczewicz as a whole, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was filed to incorporate the steps of Karczewicz into the method of Ray, Van der Auwera and Flynn. The motivation to combine Karczewicz, Van der Auwera, Flynn and Ray would be to provide efficiently context coding syntax elements associated with inter-coded video data (para. [0007] of Karczewicz).
Regarding claim 21, the claim recites similar subject matter as claim 8 and is rejected for the same reasons as stated above.
Related Art
Liu et al (US20210319595) – see para. [0071]-[0072]
Conclusion
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/LEON VIET Q NGUYEN/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2663
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