DETAILED ACTION
Introduction
1. This office action is in response to Applicant’s submission filed on 10/28/2024. Claims 1-20 are pending in the application and have been examined.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
2. 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
3. The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 10/31/2024 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Priority
4. Acknowledgment is made of applicant's claim for foreign priority based on an application filed in Korea on 10/28/2024. It is noted, however, that applicant has not filed a certified copy of KR10-2024-0148345 as required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
5. 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.
6. Claims 1 and 11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as unpatentable over “BW-EDA-EEND: STREAMING END-TO-END NEURAL SPEAKER DIARIZATION FOR A VARIABLE NUMBER OF SPEAKERS” (Han et al., hereinafter “Han”) in view of U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 20240013797 (Klejsa et al., hereinafter “Klejsa”) and “Time-domain Ad-hoc Array Speech Enhancement Using a Triple-path Network” (Pandey et al., hereinafter “Pandey”).
With regard to Claim 1, Han describes:
“A speaker separation method, performed by a computing device comprising a processor and a storage medium, for separating an unknown number of speakers from a recorded mixture signal based on an encoder-decoder separation model, the method comprising:
inputting, by the processor, the N-dimensional latent representation into a separator of the encoder-decoder separation model, wherein the separator includes a dual-path processing block for modeling spectrotemporal patterns, (Figure 1 of Han shows a dual path for processing the input embeddings.) a transformer decoder-based attractor (TDA) calculation module for handling an unknown number of speakers, (Figure 1 shows the attractors of the TDA calculation module) [[and a triple-path processing block for modeling inter-speaker relations;]]
performing, by the processor, speaker estimation for speaker separation using the separator to obtain source representations corresponding to the number of separated speakers; and (Section 3 discusses the speaker separation algorithm.)
outputting, by the processor, an audio signal for each source representation corresponding to the number of separated speakers using a decoder of the encoder-decoder separation model. (Section 3 describes that Yb is the output of each of b speakers S.)
Han does not explicitly describe:
“mapping, by the processor, the mixture signal to an N-dimensional latent representation (where N is an integer greater than or equal to 2) using an encoder of the encoder-decoder separation model;
a triple-path processing block for modeling inter-speaker relations.”
However, paragraph 35 of Klejsa describes “mapping, by the processor, the mixture signal to an N-dimensional latent representation (where N is an integer greater than or equal to 2) using an encoder of the encoder-decoder separation model.”
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include the latent mapping as described by Klejsa into the system of Han to more efficiently process the data, as described in paragraph 14 of Klejsa.
Han in view of Klejsa does not explicitly describe “a triple-path processing block for modeling inter-speaker relations.”
However, Pandey describes “a triple-path processing block for modeling inter-speaker relations.” Figure 1 shows a triple path processing block to enhance speech recognition.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include the triple path processing as described by Pandey into the system of Han in view of Klejsa to enhance speech recognition performance, as described in Section 3 of Pandey.
With respect to Claim 11, method Claim 1 and device Claim 11 are related as a device programmed to perform the same method, with each claimed device function corresponding to each claimed method step. Accordingly, Claim 11 is similarly rejected under the same rationale as applied above with respect to Claim 1.
7. Claims 2 and 12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as unpatentable over Han in view of Klejsa and Pandey and further in view of U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 20220406323 (Kaidoglu et al., hereinafter “Kaidoglu”).
Han in view of Klejsa and Pandey does not explicitly describe the subject matter of Claim 2. However, Kaidoglu describes “the encoder includes a one-dimensional convolutional layer with a kernel size of L samples (where L is an integer greater than or equal to 1) and a stride size of L/2 samples, and (Paragraph 54 describes a convolutional layer with an exemplary size and stride. Accordingly, the size and stride of a convolutional layer are result effective variables. Thus, optimizing these result effective variables is a matter of routine experimentation. See MPEP 2144.05)
wherein the mapping includes mapping, by the processor, the mixture signal to the N-dimensional latent representation using a Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) activation function. (Paragraph 59 of Kaidoglu describes that a GELU may be used.)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include the GELU as described by Kaidoglu into the system of Han in view of Klejsa and Pandey to provide performance based ob the application, as described in paragraph 59 of Kaidoglu.
Allowable Subject Matter
8. Claims 3-10 and 13-20 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.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: The cited art does not teach or suggest “dividing, by the processor, the output of the encoder into multiple chunks using the linear layer and chunking block of the separator; and inputting, by the processor, the multiple chunks into the dual-path processing block as a segmented tensor” as recited in Claim s3 and 13, or “inputting, by the processor, the output of the dual-path processing block into an overlap-add block to perform form restoration; inputting, by the processor, the output of the overlap-add block into the TDA calculation module to extract a number of attractors that is one more than the number of speakers; passing, by the processor, the attractors through the linear layer of the TDA calculation module to estimate the speaker existence probability; and after excluding the attractors determined not to correspond to any speaker based on the speaker existence probability estimation, inputting, by the processor, the remaining attractors into a FiLM (Feature-wise Linear Modulation) module to expand the speaker channels” as recited in Claims 6 and 16.
Conclusion
9. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 20240005941 (Xu et al.) describes a device that separates a plurality of speakers.
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/EDWARD TRACY JR./Examiner, Art Unit 2656
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