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 .
DETAILED ACTION
This Office Action is in response to the application 18/881,519 filed on 01/06/2025.
Claims 1 – 12 have been examined and are pending in this application.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 01/06/2025. The submission is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Specification
The lengthy specification has not been checked to the extent necessary to determine the presence of all possible minor errors. Applicant’s cooperation is requested in correcting any errors of which applicant may become aware in the specification.
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 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 1 – 3, 7 and 8 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ikonin et al. (US 2021/0211657 A1) in view of Zhao et al. (“Description of SDR video coding technology proposal by DJI and Peking University”, Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) of ITU-T SG 16 WP 3 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, 10th Meeting: San Diego, US, 10–20 Apr. 2018, Listed in IDS).
Regarding claim 1, Ikonin discloses: “a method for Adaptive Loop Filter (ALF) processing of reconstructed video, the method comprising: receiving reconstructed pixels, wherein the reconstructed pixels comprise a current block [see para: 0120; According to the method 300, 300′, gain coefficient for each frequency is derived from spectrum component of the reconstructed pixels or predicted pixels. Therefore, the method 300, 300′ do not need transmission of filtering parameters and can be applied for any reconstructed block or predicted block without additional signaling];
providing filtered-reconstructed pixels, wherein the filtered-reconstructed pixels comprise the current filtered output [see para: 0127; At step 310, 310′, the result of inverse 1D transform is placed to linear buffer of filtered reconstructed pixels or filtered pixels. [0128] At step 312, 312′ (not shown in FIG. 3A or FIG. 3B), a filtered block is generated based on the filtered pixels estimated on previous processing steps. As an example, the filtered block may be a filtered predicted block. As another example, the filtered block may be a filtered reconstructed block].
Ikonin does not explicitly disclose: “deriving a current filtered output from an ALF for a current sample in the current block, wherein the ALF comprises at least one non-local input term corresponding to a pre- SAO (Sample Adaptive Offset) reconstructed sample of the current sample and/or one or more neighboring samples of the current sample, or a filter output, from one of a fixed filter sets, of the current sample and/or said one or more neighboring samples of the current sample”.
However, Zhao, from the same or similar field of endeavor teaches: “deriving a current filtered output from an ALF for a current sample in the current block, wherein the ALF comprises at least one non-local input term corresponding to a pre- SAO (Sample Adaptive Offset) reconstructed sample of the current sample [see page: 4; section: 2.1.9; NLSF (Non-Local Structure-based Filter) is a new in-loop filter that targets at the reduction of noise by using non-local reconstructed pixels. It is employed between Deblocking Filter (DF) and Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO), which includes group construction by block matching and SVD-based filtering processes] and/or one or more neighboring samples of the current sample, or a filter output, from one of a fixed filter sets, of the current sample and/or said one or more neighboring samples of the current sample [see page: 5; section: 2.1.9.1; As illustrated in Fig 2.1.9.1-1, the input reconstructed frame is firstly divided into K overlapped blocks, and each block serves as the basic loop unit. Let
B
s
×
B
s
denote the size of loop unit, which is set to 6 by default. For the current loop unit, no more than
c
(defaulted to 20) similar blocks are collected within the corresponding search window to construct the block group. As the example of Fig 2.1.9-1, the red square represents the current loop unit, meanwhile the blue dotted square denotes the search window, and the golden dotted square denotes the CTU current block’s location. In this proposal, the size of search window is set to 32x32 by default, and SSD (Sum of Square Differences) is adopted as the matching criterion. Details of block matching process are given bellow];
It would have been obvious to the person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the Video Coding system for filtering disclosed by Ikonin to add the teachings of Zhao as above, in order to provide a means for improving adaptive loop filtering technique, process current filtered output from an ALF for a current sample in the current block wherein non-local input term corresponding to a pre- Sample Adaptive Offset reconstructed sample of the current sample. As discussed above, non-Local structure-based Filter is a new in-loop filter that targets at the reduction of noise by using non-local reconstructed pixels [Zhao see page: 4].
Regarding claim 2, Ikonin and Zhao disclose all the limitation of claim 1 and are analyzed as previously discussed with respect to that claim.
Ikonin does not explicitly disclose: “wherein one or more flags are signalled in or parsed from a bitstream to indicate a location of in-loop filtering stage associated with said at least one non- local input term”.
However, Zhao, from the same or similar field of endeavor teaches: “wherein one or more flags are signalled in or parsed from a bitstream to indicate a location of in-loop filtering stage associated with said at least one non- local input term [see page: 9; section; 3.1.6.1.1: For one frame, there are two flags signaled in slice header, slice_nlsf_luma_flag and slice_nlsf_chroma_flag, determined according to the rate-distortion costs of luma and Cb component respectively w/o NLSF. If the luma component of current frame performs better with NLSF than without, switch on the slice_nlsf_luma_flag and then calculate the rate-diatortion costs of Cb component. If Cb component performs better, switch on the slice_nlsf_luma_flag. Otherwise, switch off it. If luma component of current frame performs worse, switch off the slice_nlsf_luma_flag and don’t need to calculate the rate-distortion costs of Cb component. And the slice_nlsf_chroma_flag will not be signalled].
It would have been obvious to the person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the Video Coding system for filtering disclosed by Ikonin to add the teachings of Zhao as above, in order to provide a means for improving adaptive loop filtering process, flags are signalled or transmitted from the video data that indicate location of in-loop filtering stage associated with non-local input term [Zhao see page: 9; section; 3.1.6.1.1].
Regarding claim 3, 7 and 8, claim 3, 7 and 8 is rejected under the same art and evidentiary limitations as determined for the method of claim 1.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 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
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
CN 105791877 B
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/MASUM BILLAH/Primary Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2486