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 .
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2, 5-6, 9 and 12-13 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.
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 of this title, 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.
Claims 1, 3, 8, and 10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Isenburg (NPL Titled: Compressing Polygon Mesh Connectivity with Degree Duality Prediction) in view of Park (Pub No. US 20240338857 A1) in further view of Lim (Pub No. US 20200267385 A1)
As per claim 1, Isenburg teaches the claimed:
A method performed by at least one processor, the method comprising:
in accordance with dual degree connectivity comprising, when the polygon mesh comprises at least two different face degrees, a first sequence representing a vertex degree of each vertex in the polygon mesh, and a second sequence representing a face degree of each face in the polygon mesh (Please see Isenburg middle right column on page 1 “Our Degree Duality coder extends Touma and Gotsman’s triangle mesh compression scheme [26] to polygon meshes and borrows ideas from a paper by Alliez and Desbrun [1] to improve the compression rates. The scheme by Touma and Gotsman codes the connectivity of triangle meshes as a sequence of vertex degrees. Our scheme codes the connectivity of polygon meshes as a sequence of vertex degrees and a sequence of face degrees. Furthermore it exploits the correlation between neighboring vertex and face degrees for mutual predictive compression.”)
in this passage, Isenburg teaches the connection of the dual degree of a polygon mesh where one sequence represents the vertex degree and a second sequence represents the face degree. ,
wherein each vertex degree in the first sequence and each face degree in the second sequence is followed by a degree offset In Isenburg figure 3 shown below:
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Isenburg teaches where the face degree is 5, and the neighboring vertex degree is 4. This figure discloses a first sequence (vertex degree) and a second sequence (face degree) have an offset of 1.), and
wherein at least one degree corresponding to a vertex degree in the first sequence or a face degree in the second sequence (Isenburg in the bottom right column of the first page teaches “Our scheme codes the connectivity of polygon meshes as a sequence of vertex degrees and a sequence of face degrees. Furthermore it exploits the correlation between neighboring vertex and face degrees for mutual predictive compression. Low degree vertices are more likely to be surrounded by higher-degree faces and vice versa as illustrated in Figure 1. We predict vertex degrees based on the degree of neighboring faces and we predict face degrees based on the degree of neighboring vertices”
In this passage, and in figure 3 shown above vertex point 1 correspond to a neighboring face degree as well as a vertex degree.)
(Referring back to fig. 3 from Isenburg above, the 2 difference vertex degrees on the single face teaches that there are more than one type of neighboring faces. Specifically, vertex degree 4 is the only vertex on face 5 that differs from the rest. This shows that there is a different type of face that is connected to face 5 via vertex 4.).
Isenburg alone does not explicitly teach the remaining claim limitations.
However, Isenburg in combination with Park teaches the claimed:
generating a bitstream comprising an encoded three dimensional polygon mesh (Park [0078] “The point cloud video encoder may output a bitstream containing the encoded point cloud video data.”
Park also teaches in figure 28, a three dimensional mesh data encoder that generates a bitstream.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to generate the bitstream as taught by Park with the system of Isenburg in order to generate a bitstream that comprises an three dimensional polygon mesh that has been encoded.
Isenburg and Park alone do not explicitly teach the remaining claim limitations.
However, Isenburg in combination with Park and Lim teaches the claimed:
is encoded in accordance with a context adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) model that encodes (Lim [0247] “The way of scanning may be set differently according to entropy encoding mode. For example, in case of encoding in CABAC, inter prediction encoded quantization coefficients may be scanned in predetermined way (zigzag, or raster scan in diagonal direction)”)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the method of CABAC as taught by Lim with the system of Isenburg as modified by Park in order to significantly increase video compression efficiency. Doing so saves storage space and eliminates statistical redundancies extremely efficiently.
As per claim 3, Isenburg alone does not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Isenburg in combination with Park and Lim teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 1, wherein the degree offset in the first sequence is a first degree offset and the degree offset in the second sequence is a second degree offset, wherein the first degree offset is different from the second degree offset (In the explanation in claim 1, Isenburg teaches a first sequence (vertex degree) and a second sequence (face degree). Here is the same portion of Isenburg figure 3 shown above, along with additional portion of the same figure 3 to provide more context:
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Below is another portion of the same figure 3 from Isenburg, which displays a face degree of 6.
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The vertices 3 and 4 in face 5 have an offset of 1. However, the face degree in face 4 and the face degree in face 6 have an offset of 2. Thus the two offset values of the two different sequences are different from each other. Furthermore, in the explanation for claim 1, we have established that the vertex degree is the first sequence and the face degree is the second sequence. Given this information, the offset of the vertex sequence and the offset of the face sequence differ.
As per claim 8, the reasons and rationale for the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein. In particular, only additional features unique to claim 8 that were not present in claim 1 will be explicitly addressed here. While Isenburg, Park, and Lim do not teach the receiving of a bitstream, Park teaches the claimed:
A method performed by at least one processor, the method comprising:
receiving a bitstream (Park [0084] “The receiver 10006 according to the embodiments receives a bitstream containing point cloud video data. According to embodiments, the receiver 10006 may transmit feedback information to the point cloud data transmission device 10000”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to input a bitstream as taught by Park with the system of Isenburg in order to receive a bitstream that comprises an three dimensional polygon mesh that has been encoded. Doing so allows the system to take the bitstream data from multiple polygons and merge it into one.
As per claim 10, this claim is similar in scope to limitations recited in claim 3, respectively, and thus are rejected under the same rationale.
Claims 4 and 11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Isenburg in view of Park, in view of Lim, and in further view of Budagavi (Pub. No US 20190139266 A1).
As per claim 4, Isenburg, Park, and Lim do not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Isenburg, Park, and Lim in combination with Budagavi teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 1, wherein the bitstream comprises a flag indicating that the degree mode is a single degree mode (Budagavi [0107] “In certain embodiments, two control binary flags 508 can be used to signal the metadata. The two flags 508 can include an (i) enabling flag and a (ii) present flag associated with each type of metadata at each designated access level.”
In this passage, Budagavi teaches that each flag could identify the type of metadata. In this case, the two types of metadata are either: face degrees and vertex degrees. This corresponds to the claimed method of claim 4, wherein the bitstream would implement this flagging system to determine whether the metadata is either regarding a polygonal mesh’s face degree or a vertex degree.).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the flagging system as taught by Budagavi with the system of Isenburg as modified by Park and Lim in order to determine whether the bitstream comprises a single degree mode. Doing so allows the system to ensure that the vertex degree data sequence is separated from the face degree sequence.
As per claim 11, this claim is similar in scope to limitations recited in claim 4, and thus is rejected under the same rationale.
Claims 7 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Isenburg in view of Park, in view of Lim, and in further view of Taillandier (Pub. No US 20240331301 A1).
As per claim 7, Isenburg, Park, and Lim do not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Isenburg, Park, and Lim in combination with Taillandier teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 1, wherein the polygon mesh comprises a plurality of sub-meshes (Taillandier [0072] “In various embodiments, the polygonal mesh 500 may be comprised of one or more polygonal sub-meshes. Each sub-mesh may include a series of polygons.”), wherein each sub-mesh that comprises at least two different face degrees comprises a respective first sequence representing a vertex degree of each vertex in a respective sub-mesh, and a second sequence representing a face degree of each face in the respective sub-mesh (Taillandier [0072] “The polygonal mesh 500 comprises a collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define the shape and/or boundary of the artist-authored object. The faces may include various polygonal shapes, such as triangles, quadrilaterals, convex polygons, concave polygons, regular polygons (e.g., polygons that may have equal length sides and may have equal angles) and/or irregular polygons (e.g., polygons that may not have equal length sides and may not have equal angles)”
In these passages, Taillandier discloses the method where a polygon comprises sub-polygons. Each sub-polygon is treated as its own polygon. In the second passage, it is emphasized that each polygon may vary in shapes, thus they may have a collection of different vertices and faces degree values.
In the middle/bottom right side of Isenburg page 1, Isenburg teaches “Our scheme codes the connectivity of polygon meshes as a sequence of vertex degrees and a sequence of face degrees. Furthermore it exploits the correlation between neighboring vertex and face degrees for mutual predictive compression.”).
It is re-emphasized in this passage that was previously shared in claim 1, that the vertex degrees has a separate sequence from the face degrees of a polygon.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the method of sub-meshes as taught by Taillandier with the system of Isenburg as modified by Park and Lim in order to incorporate the ideology of polygon meshes being separated into various smaller polygon meshes, comprising of various different vertex and face degrees.
As per claim 14, this claim is similar in scope to limitations recited in claim 7, and thus is rejected under the same rationale.
Claims 15 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Khodakovsky (Patent No. US 7098916 B1) in view of Hamedi (Pub No. US 20110050691 A1)
As per claim 15, Khodakovsky teaches the claimed:
A method performed by at least one processor, comprising:
calculating, for a three dimensional polygon mesh, a degree of each face in the polygon mesh and a valence of each vertex (Khodakovsky [21] “The number of edges incident to a vertex is its "valence." Thus, in FIG. 2, the valence of vertex 208 is four, since there are four edges, identified respectively with numerals 210a, 210b, 210c, and 210d, incident to the vertex. The number of edges incident to a face is its "degree." Thus, in FIG. 2, the valence of face 206 is five, since there are five edges, identified respectively with numerals 202a, 202b, 202c, 202d, and 202e, incident to the face. The "ring" of a vertex is an ordered list of all its incident faces. In FIG. 2, the ring of vertex 208 is the ordered list of faces 212a, 212b, 212b, 212c, and 212d);
Khodakovsky does not explicitly teach the remaining claim limitations.
However, Hamedi teaches the remaining claims:
reducing, based on the calculating, a degree of at least one face in the polygon mesh via collapsing an edge of the at least one face (Please see Hamedi figure 3 below where there are 3 versions of reduced number of faces of a polygonal mesh);
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and reducing, based on the calculating, an edge valence of at least one vertex in the polygon mesh via merging a first face in the polygon mesh with a second face in the polygon mesh (In the bottom 2 polygons in Hamedi figure 3, you may see that the bottom right vertex of the polygon reduces from having a edge valence of 5 to a valence of 3. This is done by the collapsing of 5 faces in the bottom left polygon to 3 faces as shown in the bottom right polygon).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the edge collapsing as taught by Hamedi with the system of Khodakovsky in order to reduce the file size and speed up the rendering process
As per claim 20, Khodakovsky alone does not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Khodakovsky in combination with Hamedi teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 15, wherein the calculating, the reducing the degree of the at least one face, and the reducing the edge valence of the at least one vertex are repeated until a number of targeted faces or a number of targeted vertexes are reached (Hamedi [0036] “The simplification of a mesh is basically a process that finds an edge that, when ecol is performed on said edge, gives the least volumetric or visual change out of all edges in the mesh. When that edge is found, ecol is performed and the process repeats itself, performing ecol after ecol until some predefined criteria has been met (such as the volumetric change being too big, or number of remaining triangles reach a certain count). FIG. 3 displays a pyramid-like mesh that gradually gets simplified into lower resolution. As can be seen, further ecol-transformations performed on the mesh would result in a mesh that would have lost its pyramid-like shape”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to identify the target number of polygons as taught by Hamedi with the system of Khodakovsky in order to know when the stop the edge collapsing process.
Claims 16-19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Khodakovsky in view of Hamedi in further view of Luo (Pub No. US 20150379769 A1)
As per claim 16, Khodakovsky and Hamedi do not explicitly teach the claimed limitations. However, Khodakovsky in combination of Hamedi and Luo teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 15, wherein the reducing the degree of the at least one face further comprises calculating a cost of each edge of the at least one face (Luo [65] “As described above, a conventional mesh simplification based on edge collapse only considers the attributes of the vertices, by which the cost of each edge collapse transformation can be calculated, which is employed to carefully chose a sequence of these transformations”), wherein the edge of the at least one face that is collapsed has a minimum calculated cost
(Luo [77] “means for calculating a cost value of each edge formed by two adjacent vertices according to the modified quadric error metrics of the two adjacent vertices; and means for carrying out an edge collapse to an edge in ascending order of the cost value”
In this passage, ).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to identify the edge where the process of merging two neighboring faces has the lowest calculated cost as taught by Luo with the system of Khodakovsky as modified by Hamedi in order to create a queue and starting point of the recursive edge collapsing process .
As per claim 17, Khodakovsky and Hamedi alone do not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Khodakovsky and Hamedi in combination of Luo teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 16, wherein the cost is calculated using a quadratic approximation error (Luo [0006 - 0007] “Moreover, a carefully chosen sequence of edge collapse can control the quality of the approximating meshes […] it is proposed to modify the above-described edge collapse method to introduce quadratic error metric (QEM) for controlling the order of simplification. The error/importance of a vertex can be computed as the sum of its squared distances to the supporting planes of its incident triangles. A generalization of QEM has been presented to simplify surfaces with vertex properties such as color and texture. QEM can be enhanced to consider the color information on surface” ).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the method of cost calculating as taught by Luo with the system of Khodakovsky as modified by Hamedi in order to provide high computational efficiency.
As per claim 18, Khodakovsky and Hamedi alone do not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Khodakovsky and Hamedi in combination of Luo teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 15, wherein the reducing the edge valence of the at least one vertex further comprises calculating a cost of merging of each pair of neighbor faces of the at least one vertex wherein the first face and the second face is the pair of neighbor faces with a minimum calculated cost (Luo 0043 - 0044] “At the step 307, all of the edges are stored in a priority queue according to the ascending order of these cost values, which determines the order of edge collapse. Then at the step S308, the edge with minimum cost is first contracted during the process of edge collapse.”
In this passage, Luo discloses that the cost calculation of each edge collapse, where two faces merge into one, and the minimum calculated cost performs the edge collapse process. The two faces that are removed through this process correspond to the two neighbor faces that are merged in the claimed invention).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the edge collapsing queue as taught by Luo with the system of Khodakovsky as modified by Hamedi in order to ensure that the system starts with the edge collapse that has the lowest cost value and move up to the edge collapse that has the highest cost value.
As per claim 19, Khodakovsky and Hamedi alone do not explicitly teach the claimed limitations.
However, Khodakovsky and Hamedi in combination of Luo teaches the claimed:
The method according to claim 18, wherein the cost is calculated using a quadratic approximation error (Please see the explanation for claim 17).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to use the method of cost calculating as taught by Luo with the system of Khodakovsky as modified by Hamedi in order to provide high computational efficiency.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to SARAH Y. LEE whose telephone number is (571)272-8374. The examiner can normally be reached 8am-5pm.
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SARAH Y. LEE
Examiner
Art Unit 2616
/DANIEL F HAJNIK/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2616
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