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 .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claim 5 recites the limitation "the BEV output" and “the original BEV output” in lines 2-3. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim.
Claim 9 recites the limitation "the strength of noise added” in line 1. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 10 recites the limitation "the total number of steps in the noise adding process” in line 2. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 12 recites the limitation "the generated BEV data” in line 6. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim. Claims 13-17 depends from claim 12, therefore they are rejected.
Claim 14 recites the limitation "the fine-tuning stage” in line 2. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 16 recites the limitation "the tasks” in line 2. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 17 recites the limitation “the denoised BEV representations” in line 2. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
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 18 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over NPL2 (From Bird’s-Eye to Street View: Crafting Diverse and Condition-Aligned Images with Latent Diffusion Model, Xiaojie Xu et al., IEEE, May 2024, Pages 16795-16802) hereafter NPL2 (Single reference 103 as the claimed limitations “One or more processors, memory storing instructions—cause the system to perform operations—” would be obvious and within one of ordinary skill in the art in view of “computational resources disclosed on page 16795 Abstract and “optimizing computational efficiency” disclosed on page 16796 section II.
1. Regarding claim 18, NPL2 discloses a system (Figs 1-4 shows and discloses a system), comprising:
one or more processors (examiner notes that one or more processors would be obvious and within one of ordinary skill in the art in view of “computational resources disclosed on page 16795 Abstract and “optimizing computational efficiency” disclosed on page 16796 section II); a memory storing instructions that, when executed by the processors, cause the system to perform operations (examiner notes that a memory storing instructions that, when executed by the processors, cause the system to perform operations would be obvious and within one of ordinary skill in the art in view of “computational resources disclosed on page 16795 Abstract and “optimizing computational efficiency” disclosed on page 16796 section II) comprising:
pretraining a diffusion model system on Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations using a noise-adding process (Fig 2, pages 16797-16798 shows and discloses a pretraining U Net model system using BEV map (i.e Birds eye view representations) and adding the Gaussian noise in Stage II meeting the above claim limitations);
fine-tuning a BEV generation network by incorporating the pretrained diffusion model system, wherein the diffusion model system denoises BEV outputs and provides supervision through a supervision loss during training (Figs 2, 5, page 16798 Col 2 through page 16799 discloses fine-tuning a BEV generation network by incorporating the pretrained diffusion model system, wherein the diffusion model system denoises BEV outputs and provides supervision through a supervision loss during training (i.e the training loss discloses on page 16798)); and
outputting denoised BEV features for use in downstream autonomous driving tasks (figs 2-3 and pages 16795-16797 shows the output generated images in the camera view used in the real-time road driving (i.e downstream autonomous tasks) meeting the claim limitations). Before the effective filing date of the invention was made, one or more processors, memory storing instructions executable by the one or more processors to perform the steps would be obvious and within one of ordinary skill in the art. The suggestion/motivation would be optimizing the computational efficiency (page 16796 col 1).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 1 is allowed. Regarding claim 1, Acuna Marrero et al., (US20260065517) hereafter Acuna discloses “A method (figs 1C, 3, 5A. 15A discloses a method), comprising: receiving Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations from a vehicle vision system (paras 0022, 0025, 0029-0030, 0163 shows and discloses a method receiving Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations from a vehicle vision system); pretraining a diffusion model system on the Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations to obtain a pretrained diffusion model system (figs 1C, 3, 5A and paras 0022, 0025, 0029-0034, 0163 discloses pretraining a diffusion model system on the Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations to obtain a pretrained diffusion model system).
Regarding independent claim 1, Johnson, Mark et al., (WO2023164705A1) hereafter Johnson discloses in figs 10 and 12, generating BEV data 1002 (it includes data from the top down (i.e BEV) network 1028, see fig 10 for the flow) using the pretrained BEV generator framework 1000, the BEV data also includes semantic ground truth 1032 (see fig 10 for the flow) and fig 12 element 1212 is the added noise to the semantic map (i.e 1210 and corresponding semantic map 1002 which is the BEV data of fig 10) meeting the limitations of “the pretraining including adding noise iteratively to BEV data generated by a pretrained BEV generator framework, wherein the BEV data includes ground truth conditions”.
Regarding independent claim 1, NPL1 (DiffBEV: Conditional Diffusion Model for Bird’s Eye View Perception, Jiayu Zou et al., arXiv, Mar 2023, Pages 1-13) hereafter NPL1 discloses training the diffusion model system by adding noise to the BEV data (i.e BEV features) as seen in Fig 2.
Regarding claim 1, Acuna, Johnson and NPL1 alone or in combination however fails to disclose “training the diffusion model system in association with a training objective by predicting noise added during each iterative step of adding noise to the BEV data, the training objective is based on a noise prediction function and ground truth conditions; and denoising the BEV data by reversing the noise-adding process using the pretrained diffusion model system to obtain denoised BEV data for use in one or more autonomous vehicle operations.”, therefore claim 1 is allowed. Claims 2-4, 6-8 and 11 depends from claim 1 are also allowed.
Claims 5, 9 and 10 would be allowable if rewritten to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action and to include all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Claims 19 and 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.
Examiner's Note: Examiner has cited figures, and paragraphs in the references as applied to the claims above for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested for the applicant, in preparing the responses, to fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner. Examiner has also cited references in PTO892 but not relied on, which are relevant and pertinent to the applicant’s disclosure, and may also be reading (anticipatory/obvious) on the claims and claimed limitations. Applicant is advised to consider the references in preparing the response/amendments in-order to expedite the prosecution.
Conclusion
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/JAYESH A PATEL/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2677
/JAYESH PATEL/
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 2677
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