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 .
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Information Disclosure Statement
This office acknowledges receipt of the following item(s) from the applicant:
Information Disclosure Statement(s) (IDS) filed on 14 October 2024, 09 May 2025 and 25 November 2025. The references have been considered.
Drawings
The drawings are objected to because some of the numbers are hard to make out clearly and could cause issues identify the different elements of the figures. 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.
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 11 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim(s) does/do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the claim contains a limitation directed to a computer readable storage medium that has not limited to not include non-statutory transitory forms of signal transmission, such as a propagating electrical or electromagnetic signal per se. As the claim could be directed to a carrier wave, which does not fall with one of the four categories of invention, it is suggested that an amendment made to limit the claim to non-transitory forms of storage medium.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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) 8, 10, 11, 13 and 14 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gogineni et al. (Gogineni, High Fidelity RF Clutter Modeling and Simulation) in view of Xin et al. (Xin, CN109782277 machine translation).
Referring to Claim 8, Gogineni teaches a) providing a terrain model including discrete flat ground patches each having a reflectivity, area, surface normal vector, and position within a global coordinate frame, that are all independent of view point (pg 3 left column paragraph 4-right column paragraph 1); b) calculating triplet values of reflected energy, range and Doppler shift for each discrete patch of the terrain model for a given position and pose of an antenna with known gain and phase characteristics within the global coordinate frame (pg 3 left column paragraph 4-right column paragraph 1 and pg 6 right column paragraph under Fig. 10 and pg 7 left column paragraph 1); c) for a given radar receiver sample rate and Pulse repetition frequency (PRF),resampling and integrating over all patches to derive: i) energy within each discrete range-Doppler pair bin of a set defined by the PRF and sample rate; and/or ii) receiver signal level at discrete time samples for each pulse (pg 7 entirety); but does not explicitly disclose nor limit and d) wherein the resampling and integrating process includes carrying out a first 2D transformation of the triplet values using a non-uniform Fast Fourier Transform (NUFFT), followed by a further transformation of an output of the first transformation using an inverse Fast Fourier Transform.
However, Xin teaches wherein the resampling and integrating process includes carrying out a first 2D transformation of the triplet values using a non-uniform Fast Fourier Transform (NUFFT), followed by a further transformation of an output of the first transformation using an inverse Fast Fourier Transform; [0116-0123].
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to modify Gogineni with the NUFFT processing as taught by Xin as the use of known techniques is well known in the art and the NUFFT processing predictably allows for restoring the sampling uniformity of the azimuth signal of the radar echo data.
Referring to Claim 10, Gogineni as modified by Xin teaches calculating triplet values of reflected energy, range and Doppler shift for each discrete patch of the terrain model for a given position and pose of both non-co-located transmit antenna and a receive antenna within the global coordinate frame, each having known gain and phase characteristics; (pg 7 right column).
Referring to Claim 11, Gogineni as modified by Xin teaches a computer readable store holding a terrain model configured from discrete flat ground patches each having a reflectance, area, surface normal vector, and position within a global coordinate frame, that are all independent of view point; and one or more processors configured with software that when executed will cause the one or more processors to perform functions of: a radar render configured to calculate triplet values of reflected energy, range and Doppler shift for each discrete patch of the terrain model for a given position and pose of an antenna with known gain and phase characteristics within the global coordinate frame; and a model calculator configured and adapted to, for a given radar receiver sample rate and Pulse repetition frequency (PRF), resample and integrate over all patches to derive either: i) energy within each discrete range-Doppler pair bin of a set defined by the PRF and sample rate; and/or ii) receiver signal level at discrete time samples for each pulse; wherein the resampling and integrating process when carried out by the model calculator will include carrying out a first 2D transformation of the triplet values using a NUFFT, followed by a further transformation of the output of the first transformation using an inverse FFT; this claim is alternative of Claim 8 above, see the citations and rationale applied to claim 8 as well as [0075] of Xin.
Referring to Claim 13, Gogineni as modified by Xin teaches a) providing a terrain model comprising discrete flat ground patches each having a reflectivity, area, surface normal vector, and position within a global coordinate frame, that are all independent of view point; b) calculating triplet values of reflected energy, range and Doppler shift for each discrete patch of the terrain model for a given position and pose of an antenna with known gain and phase characteristics within the global coordinate frame; c) for a given radar receiver sample rate and Pulse repetition frequency (PRF),resampling and integrating over all patches to derive either: i) energy within each discrete range-Doppler pair bin of a set defined by the PRF and sample rate; and/or ii) receiver signal level at discrete time samples for each pulse; and d) wherein the resampling and integrating process includes carrying out a first 2D transformation of the triplet values using a non-uniform Fast Fourier Transform (NUFFT), followed by a further transformation of the output of the first transformation using an inverse Fast Fourier Transform; this claim is alternative of Claim 8 above, see the citations and rationale applied to claim 8.
Referring to Claim 14, Gogineni as modified by Xin teaches providing a computer model of the radar component; and simulating operation of the radar component by running the computer model of the radar component using, as an input to the computer model, simulated radar reflections from ground and/or sea clutter derived from the simulating of radar reflections from ground and/or sea clutter for a pulse-Doppler radar; see the citations of Gogineni and Xin applied above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 9 and 12 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 WHITNEY T MOORE whose telephone number is (571)270-3338. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday from 7am-4pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Jack Keith can be reached at (571) 272-6878. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/WHITNEY MOORE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3646
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