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 .
Double Patenting
The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the conflicting claims are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on nonstatutory double patenting provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with the examined application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. See MPEP § 717.02 for applications subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA as explained in MPEP § 2159. See MPEP § 2146 et seq. for applications not subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The filing of a terminal disclaimer by itself is not a complete reply to a nonstatutory double patenting (NSDP) rejection. A complete reply requires that the terminal disclaimer be accompanied by a reply requesting reconsideration of the prior Office action. Even where the NSDP rejection is provisional the reply must be complete. See MPEP § 804, subsection I.B.1. For a reply to a non-final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.111(a). For a reply to final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.113(c). A request for reconsideration while not provided for in 37 CFR 1.113(c) may be filed after final for consideration. See MPEP §§ 706.07(e) and 714.13.
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Claim 1-9 rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claim 1, 3-9 of U.S. Patent No.12,100,234. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because they read on the features of the above claims.
Re claim 1 the ‘234 patent discloses
A method for determining a probability of optical character recognition substitution errors in a text to thereby improve the likelihood of properly correcting optical character recognition substitution errors made during a post-optical character recognition process, said method comprising: (see claim 1 “A method for determining a probability of optical character recognition substitution errors in a text to thereby improve the likelihood of properly correcting optical character recognition substitution errors made during a post-optical character recognition process, said method comprising:” )
estimating character substitution probabilities based on pixel edit distances between characters, wherein said estimating comprises: (see claim 1 “estimating character substitution probabilities based on pixel edit distances between characters, wherein said estimating comprises:”)
determining a pixel layout of a candidate character; (see claim 1 “determining a pixel layout of a candidate character;”)
determining a pixel layout of an error character; (see claim 1 “determining a pixel layout of an error character” )
and determining a number of non-overlapping pixels between the candidate character and the error character. (see claim 1 “determining a number of non-overlapping pixels between the candidate character and the error character”)
Re claim 2 Claim 1 discloses
wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises: ( see claim 1 “wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises one or more of”)
determining a word edit distance between a candidate word that contains the candidate character and an error word that contains the error character, said determining comprising: counting a number of spaces between a series of characters that form a candidate word to derive a number of candidate words; counting a number of spaces between a series of characters that form an error word to derive a number of error words; and subtracting the number of candidate words from the number of error words; (see claim 1 “determining a word edit distance between a candidate word that contains the candidate character and an error word that contains the error character, which includes: (i) counting a number of spaces between a series of characters that form a candidate word to derive a number of candidate words; (ii) counting a number of spaces between a series of characters that form an error word to derive a number of error words; and (iii) subtracting the number of candidate words from the number of error words” )
determining a character edit distance between the candidate character and the error character, comprising: identifying each character contained in the candidate word to derive a set of candidate characters; identifying each character contained in the error word to derive a set of error characters; and identifying a number of characters that differ between the set of candidate characters and the set of error characters (see claim 1 “determining the character edit distance between the candidate character and the error character, which includes: (i) identifying each character contained in the candidate word to derive a set of candidate characters; (ii) identifying each character contained in the error word to derive a set of error characters; and (iii) identifying a number of characters that differ between the set of candidate characters and the set of error characters.”)
Re claim 3 Claim 3 of the patent discloses wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises taking a sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance. (see claim 3 “wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises taking a sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance.”)
Re claim 4 claim 4 of the patent discloses wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises assigning a weight value to the candidate word, assigning a weight value to the candidate character, and assigning a weight value to the candidate pixel. (see claim 4 “wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises assigning a weight value to the candidate word, assigning a weight value to the candidate character, and assigning a weight value to the candidate pixel.”)
Re claim 5, claim 5 discloses wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises: taking a product of the word edit distance and the weight value of the word edit distance to derive a word product; taking a product of the character edit distance and the weight value of the candidate character to derive a character product; taking a product of the pixel edit distance and the weight value of the candidate pixel to derive a pixel product; and summing the word product, the character product, and the pixel product. (see claim 5 “wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises: taking a product of the word edit distance and the weight value of the word edit distance to derive a word product; taking a product of the character edit distance and the weight value of the candidate character to derive a character product; taking a product of the pixel edit distance and the weight value of the candidate pixel to derive a pixel product; and summing the word product, the character product, and the pixel product.” )
Re claim 6 claim 6 of the patent discloses wherein assigning the weight value to the candidate character and assigning the weight value to the candidate pixel is based on pixel edit distances. (see claim 6 “wherein assigning the weight value to the candidate character and assigning the weight value to the candidate pixel is based on pixel edit distances.”
Re claim 7 claim 7 of the patent discloses wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises assigning a rank value to the candidate word, wherein the rank value is added to the sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance. (See claim 7 “wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises assigning a rank value to the candidate word, wherein the rank value is added to the sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance.”)
Re claim 8, claim 8 of the patent discloses wherein the method further comprises performing a context-sensitive step, said step comprising obtaining contextual information from a language model, and thereby assigning a context-sensitive rank value. (see claim 8 “wherein the method further comprises performing a context-sensitive step, said step comprising obtaining contextual information from a language model, and thereby assigning a context-sensitive rank value.”)
Re claim 9, claim 9 of the patent discloses wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises adding the context-sensitive rank value to the sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance. (see claim 9 “wherein the method for determining the probability of optical character recognition substitution errors further comprises adding the context-sensitive rank value to the sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance.”)
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.
Claims 10 and 11 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
RE claim 10 the claim recites “providing a plurality of possible candidate words, wherein each of the possible candidate words comprises a word and a character; determining a pixel-edit distance between each of the characters of the candidate words and the character of the error word; determining a word edit distance between each of the words of the candidate words and the word of the error word; determining a character edit distance between each of the characters of the candidate characters and the character of the error word; adding the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distances for each of the candidate words; and assigning a rank value to each of the candidate words, wherein the respective rank value is multiplied by the sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance for each of the candidate words;
and providing an operating dictionary which comprises out-of-vocabulary words each of which are assigned to a rank; and analyzing the ranks from the operating dictionary in light of the rank values of the candidate words, to select the correct candidate word.”.
The limitation of “providing a plurality of possible candidate words, wherein each of the possible candidate words comprises a word and a character”, as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example, this step could be performed by merely thinking of a candidate word with characters
The limitation of “determining a pixel-edit distance between each of the characters of the candidate words and the character of the error word”, as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind For example this step could be performed by merely mentally estimating a pixel edit distance.
The limitation of “determining a word edit distance between each of the words of the candidate words and the word of the error word”, as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind For example this step could be performed by merely mentally estimating a word edit distance.
The limitations of “determining a character edit distance between each of the characters of the candidate characters and the character of the error word” as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind For example this step could be performed by merely mentally estimating a pixel edit distance.
The limitations of “adding the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distances for each of the candidate words” as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example this step could be performed by merely mentally performing the addition
The limitations of “assigning a rank value to each of the candidate words, wherein the respective rank value is multiplied by the sum of the word edit distance, the character edit distance, and the pixel edit distance for each of the candidate words” as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example this step could be performed by merely mentally performing the ranking and multiplication.
The limitations of “providing an operating dictionary which comprises out-of-vocabulary words each of which are assigned to a rank” as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example, this step could be performed by merely mentally thinking of the diction i.e. mentally thinking of the out of vocabulary words and their rank.
The limitations of “analyzing the ranks from the operating dictionary in light of the rank values of the candidate words, to select the correct candidate word” as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example, this step could be performed by merely mentally performing the analysis.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because the claims do not cite any additional elements/steps beyond the mental process. The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claims do not require any additional steps beyond the mental process.
Re claim 11 the claim recites “wherein the operating dictionary is a per-document dictionary wherein the per-document dictionary exists only for the duration of the processing of the document, and wherein the method further comprises determining a frequency of occurrence of the out-of-vocabulary words contained in the text, and calculating a rank value to each of the out-of-vocabulary words contained in the text.”
The limitation of “wherein the operating dictionary is a per-document dictionary wherein the per-document dictionary exists only for the duration of the processing of the document”, as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example, this step could be performed by merely thinking of a of a dictionary i.e. list of words that exist only for the document and forgetting the dictionary after processing the document.
The limitation of “wherein the method further comprises determining a frequency of occurrence of the out-of-vocabulary words contained in the text,”, as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example, this step could be performed by merely mentally determining a frequency of occurrence of out of vocabulary words.
The limitation of “calculating a rank value to each of the out-of-vocabulary words contained in the text”, as drafted, is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind. That is nothing in the claim element precludes the step from practically being performed in the mind. For example, this step could be performed by merely mentally calculating the rank value.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because the claims do not cite any additional elements/steps beyond the mental process. The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claims do not require any additional steps beyond the mental process.
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) 1 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Manohar US 9,286,526 in view of Howie US2010/0061634.
Re claim 1 A method for determining optical character recognition substitution errors in a text to thereby improve the likelihood of properly correcting optical character recognition substitution errors made during a post-optical character recognition process (see abstract and see column 13 lines 30-50 n note that an pixel edit is compared with previous stored correction to determine a match, note the corrections are to character recognition see also column 7 lines 15-30 note that the corrections are related to OCR see column 8 lines 50-55 note that greater edit accuracy is achieved), said method comprising: estimating character substitution probability (see column 13 lines 5-10 confidence score for an edit )based on pixel edit distances between characters (see column 13 lines 30-50 note that the number of pixels in common are determined ) , wherein said estimating comprises: determining a pixel layout of a candidate character (see column 13 lines 30-50 character signature of at least one manual correction ); determining a pixel layout of an error character(see column 13 lines 30-50 see character signature of at least one edit ); and determining a number of overlapping pixels between the candidate character and the error character (see column 13 lines 30-50 see number of pixels in common between the two signatures is determined ).
Manohar uses overlapping pixels instead of non-overlapping pixels Howie et al discloses in a document processing application, determining a number of non-overlapping pixels (See paragraph 105). One of ordinary skill in the art could have easily used mismatched non over lapping pixels in place of overlapping matching pixel to measure image similarity. This substitution would yield predictable results of determining if the images are similar in a similar manner. Therefore, it would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to one of ordinary skill in the art to combine Howie and Manohar.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 2-9 would be allowable a terminal disclaimer was filed to overcome the double patenting rejection, set forth in this Office action and to include all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Cited Art
The following is a listing of cited art considered relevant but not cited in a rejection.
KwokUS 20020165873 A1 “Another measure suitable for use with the present invention is an edit distance. An edit distance is a measure of "distance" between two words. It can be thought of as a measure of the similarity (or non-similarity) between two words. A simple measure of the edit distance is the number of characters that are different between two words. For example, the two words "cat" and "cot" differ in one character position, and the edit distance would therefore be one. Using this definition, a measure of edit difference could be determined through the following formula: (worst case edit distance-edit distance)/worst case edit distance. In the latter example, this is (3-1)/3, or 2/3. Thus, as edit distance increases, the edit distance measure decreases.” See paragraph 62
MA US 20240086179 A “Edit distance match engine 130 is queried to determine if the end of the dictionary word list has been reached, step 402. If words remain in the dictionary list, then the first remaining word is selected for comparison to the initial word, step 404. The selected dictionary word and the initial word are pre-compared, step 406. The pre-comparing step is designed to speed up the process. In present exemplary embodiment, the mis-recognized word and the corresponding candidate words are determined to have an edit distance less than 30. Thus, it is desirable not to perform a complete edit distance calculation for any words with a length difference or a character difference more than three. If a dictionary word is rejected by this pre-comparison, the operation returns to query edit distance match engine 130 if any other dictionary words remain to be compared, step 408.” See paragraph 63
Denoue US 20080267503 A1 [0048] FIG. 8 shows example resulting word image suggestions after grouping the FIG. 7 word image suggestions by image similarity, according to embodiments. This third similarity measure reduces the number of word image suggestions from the example 39 in FIG. 7 to the example 33 in FIG. 8. Current techniques can be used to perform image similarity. For example, in embodiments, two images are considered similar if their total pixel-by-pixel difference is less than some threshold. In another example, in embodiments, two images are considered similar if the number of pixels differing between the images is less than some proportion of the total pixels. In embodiments, a pixel is considered to differ between two images if the mean square difference between the pixels exceeds some threshold. In embodiments, for performance reasons, word images and their similarities can be pre-computed for frequent words or frequently queried words. (see paragraph 48)
Meyer US 20090016606 A1 “According to an aspect of the present invention, instead of establishing an a priori mathematical model of distortions in an image comprising text, the main issue is that pixels representing characters, character fragments (which may be natural due to typographical aspects of the text or artificial due to deformations), words or parts of words constitute connected pixels, wherein connected pixels related to characters are spaced apart by a distance defined by the typeface used (Times New Roman etc.), and wherein groups of connected pixels forming words are spaced by another distance defining distance between words on a text line, wherein it is possible to search an image to identify even deformed text lines based on said searching using for example said distances.”(see paragraph 19)
Lin; Xiaofan US 10769200 B1 “A user can capture an image of a text object of interest and have that image submitted for processing. The image can be pre-processed to improve quality and then submitted to an optical character recognition process to identify the words, characters, or strings in the image. At least some of these results can be submitted as a query to a search engine to obtain potential matches. In order to improve the accuracy of the results, information such as the titles for the results can be compared against each recognized word, character, or string from the image, including the ordering of those elements. An updated relevancy score can then be generated based on the full, ordered set. The recognized text is also analyzed to attempt to recognize model numbers or other identifiers that can be weighted more heavily as being indicative of accurate matches. Matches are selected from the re-ranked results” (see abstract)
Conclusion
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/SEAN T MOTSINGER/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2673
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