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 .
Claim Objections
Claim 8 is objected to because of the following informalities:
“A one” in line 1 of claim 8 seems like it should be –A—(i.e. delete “one”).
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 3-5, 10-12, and 17-19, are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
As per Claim 4 (and similarly claims 11 and 18):
The original Specification (i.e. the original Specification of Parent Application 18/342,060, hereafter original Specification, where this application is a continuation, and not a continuation-in-part) does not have written description for wherein the reverb cancellation values are, for a particular bin, based on a reverb cancellation value of a previous bin (the equations and description in col. 5, lines 17-36 of US Patent 11,410,670 seem to describe where reverb cancellation values are based on information pertaining to a previous frame [indicated by the subscript t-1] but does not appear to describe where Y or Z are based on any information pertaining to a previous bin [which seems like it would be indicated by the subscript b-1])
As per Claims 3 and 5 (and similarly claims 10, 12, 17, and 19):
The original Specification does not have written description for both wherein the reverb cancellation values are, for a particular bin, based on a combination of a current FFT magnitude and a reverb rolloff exponent proportional to the length of a reverb tail of the acoustic environment (in claim 3) and wherein a reverb cancellation value for the particular bin comprises a combination of a reverb cancellation magnitude and the reverb cancellation value of the previous bin subtracted from a FFT magnitude of the particular bin (in claim 5).
More specifically, the equations and description in col. 5, lines 17-36 of US Patent 11,410,670 seem to suggest where Y is something called an “output value” and where Z is something called a “value passed to a decoding engine at a given frame t”.
For claim 3, the claim language “based on a combination of a current FFT magnitude and a reverb rolloff exponent proportional to the length of a reverb tail of the acoustic environment” appears to be supported by the equation for Y, but Y is described as an “output value” and “output value” is not intuitively synonymous with reverb cancellation value, and claim 5 seems to suggest that Z is a reverb cancellation value. While it is conceivable that both Y and Z are reverb cancellation values (e.g. where “output value”/Y refers to a value which is “output”/”passed to” a decoding engine), this is not clearly the case based on what is recited in the original Specification.
For claim 5, Applicant seems to have intended for claim 5 to be supported by the equation for Z, but no part of the equation for Z is bin-specific (no subscript with “b” appears in the equation for Z or the description for beta, and no part of the equation for Y references a previous bin [which seems like it would be indicated by the subscript b-1]). Additionally, similar to what was discussed above in the 112(a) rejection of claim 4, the original Specification does not seem to support where a reverb cancellation value is based on “the reverb cancellation value of the previous bin”. Additionally, the original Specification does not appear to describe “a FFT magnitude of the particular bin” because FFT magnitudes appear to be represented by X and appear to be frame-specific and not bin-specific.
The dependent claims include the issues of their respective parent claims.
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.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
As per Claim 1 (and similarly claims 8 and 15):
“the spectrum” in the 6th to last line of claim 1 lacks antecedent basis.
As per Claim 3 (and similarly claims 10 and 17):
“the length of a reverb tail of the acoustic environment” in line 3 of claim 3 lacks antecedent basis.
As per Claim 5 (and similarly claims 12 and 19):
“a combination of a reverb cancellation magnitude and the reverb cancellation value of the previous bin subtracted from a FFT magnitude of the particular bin” is not clear because it can be interpreted as either:
1. where “a combination of a reverb cancellation magnitude and the reverb cancellation value of the previous bin” is “subtracted from a FFT magnitude of the particular bin”
or
2. “a combination of” A. “a reverb cancellation magnitude” and B. “the reverb cancellation value of the previous bin subtracted from a FFT magnitude of the particular bin” (i.e. where only the previous bin’s cancellation value is subtracted from a FFT magnitude of the particular bin, and where a combination of the subtraction result and the reverb cancellation magnitude is part of the reverb cancellation value for the particular bin.
The dependent claims include the issues of their respective parent claims.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1, 8, and 15, would be allowable if rewritten or amended 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.
Claims 2, 6-7, 9, 13-14, 16, and 20, 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.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
As per Claim(s) 1 (and similarly claim[s] 8 and 15, and consequently claim[s] 2-7, 9-14, and 16-20, which depend on claim[s] 1, 8, and 15), the prior art of record does not teach or suggest the combination of all limitations in claim(s) 1, including (i.e. in combination with the remaining limitations in claim[s] 1) A device, comprising: at least one microphone; at least one processor; and memory storing instructions that when executed by the at least one processor cause the device to: receive an environment measurement signal in an acoustic environment; determine an impulse response of the acoustic environment based on the environment measurement signal; receive an audio signal in the acoustic environment, the audio signal comprising data encoded as a sequence of tones; deconvolve the received audio signal based on the impulse response to obtain an input signal; process the input signal using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to produce bins of magnitudes across the spectrum; apply reverb cancellation values in at least one decoding engine to the bins of magnitudes to remove reverberation from the input signal and obtain the sequence of tones; and after applying the reverb cancellation values, decode the obtained sequence of tones to extract the data.
9749474 teaches “The reverberation function h.sub.ext(n) may be a filter function that convolves a room impulse response with the respective signals L′ and R… The reverberation function h.sub.ext(n) may correspond to an impulse response measurement from the near end environment (e.g., obtained via the microphone of the headset 240), or may be selected from a variety of pre-defined settings. For example, the pre-defined settings may correspond to a dry environment (e.g., a recording studio), a low reverberation environment (e.g., a small room), a medium reverberation environment (e.g., a large room), etc. The pre-defined settings may correspond to ranges of settings that the near end user may select. For example, the default setting may be a low reverberation environment; the near end user may increment and decrement the reverberation in steps (e.g., 10 steps decrementing to reach the dry environment, or 10 steps incrementing to reach the medium reverberation environment). The settings can be used, for example, to match the externalization reverberation to the acoustics of the room the user is talking in. Also, the settings can be user to select a reverberation characteristic the user prefers for single participant (point to point) or multi-participant (conference call) scenarios” (col. 7, line 47 – col. 8, line 9) and “The reverberation parameters 260 may be in the form of an impulse response function h.sub.f(n) or filter coefficients that model the far end acoustic environment; the filter coefficients may then be used to generate the impulse response function. The dereverb filter 510 convolves the inverse of the impulse response function h.sub.f(n)—h.sub.fi(n)—with the audio signal 250 from the far end, to generate the filtered audio signal 520; this may be represented mathematically as follows… The reverberation parameters 260 may be obtained from a reverb detector (see the reverb detector 210 in FIG. 2; not shown in FIG. 5) that detects the reverberation in the audio signal 250 from the far end. The reverberation parameters 260 may be obtained from metadata (see FIG. 4).” (col. 9, lines 33-57). Convolving with an inverse of an impulse response is, mathematically, deconvolving with the impulse response. This reference does not appear to describe where the audio signal which is deconvolved based on the impulse response comprises data encoded as a sequence of tones, and does not appear to describe decoding/decrypting data from a tone sequence.
2010/0182510 teaches “For the noise reduction, a spectral weighting function is estimated which can be calculated on the basis of different optimization criteria. It provides low values or zero in frequency bins in which there is primarily interference, and values close or equal to one for bins in which voice energy is dominant (FIG. 5). The weighing function is generally reestimated for each signal frame in each frequency bin. The total amount of the weighting values for all frequency bins of a frame is also referred to as the "short-term spectrum of the weighting function" or simply as the "weighting function" in this case… Multiplying the weighting function by the short-term spectrum of the noisy signal produces the filtered spectrum, in which the amplitudes of the frequency bins in which interference is dominant are greatly reduced, while voice components remain almost without influence (FIGS. 8 and 9)” (paragraphs 5-6). This reference appears to be directed to removing interference from voice data, not from an audio signal comprising a sequence of tones that encode data, and the dereverberation does not appear to be performed in a decoding engine.
2015/0012269 teaches “The dereverberation unit 106 separates the sound signals input from the sound source separation unit 105 into band components of the frequency bands B.sub.m. The dereverberation unit 106 removes the component of the late reflection which is part of a reverberation by correcting the amplitude of the corresponding band component using the weighting parameter .delta..sub.b,m indicated by the correction data input from the reverberation estimation unit 102 for each separated band component. The dereverberation unit 106 combines the band components of which the amplitude is corrected for the frequency bands B.sub.m and generates a dereverbed speech signal indicating the speech (dereverbed speech) from which the reverberation is removed. The dereverberation unit 106 does not change the phases at the time of correcting the amplitudes of the input sound signals. The dereverberation unit 106 outputs the generated dereverbed speech signal to the speech recognition unit 108” (paragraph 67) and “In the first embodiment, the correction data generation unit generates the correction data for each predetermined frequency band and the dereverberation unit corrects the amplitude for each frequency band using the correction data of the corresponding frequency band, whereby the reverberation component is removed. Accordingly, since the reverberation component is removed in consideration of reverberation characteristics (for example, the lower the frequency becomes, the higher the reverberation level becomes) different depending on the frequency bands, it is possible to improve the reverberation reduction accuracy” (paragraph 156). This reference appears to be directed to removing interference from voice data, not from an audio signal comprising a sequence of tones that encode data, and the dereverberation does not appear to be performed in a decoding engine.
2007/0104335 teaches “Broadly speaking, the present invention has described a method of acoustic feedback suppression, comprising the steps of: [0010] i). obtaining digitized time-domain samples of acoustic signals, [0011] ii). performing discrete time-frequency transformation on the digitized time-domain samples to generate a plurality of frequency bins of a frequency resolution, [0012] iii). identifying a howling frequency bin, said howling frequency bin containing a maximum magnitude among the plurality of frequency bins, [0013] iv). isolating a peak frequency within said howling frequency bin for suppression, and [0014] v). suppressing said peak frequency. The isolation of a peak frequency from a frequency bin makes possible the suppression of the howling frequency from a frequency bin so that the non-howling frequencies within the bin are not unnecessarily suppressed” (paragraph 9). This reference appears to only apply suppression to one identified howling frequency bin.
Double Patenting
For clarity of the record, NO Double Patenting rejections are required between the claims of this application and the claims of Parent Patents US 11,410,670, US 11,854,569, US 12,154,588) because the claims of the Parent Patents do not teach or suggest at least receive an environment measurement signal in an acoustic environment; determine an impulse response of the acoustic environment based on the environment measurement signal; receive an audio signal in the acoustic environment, the audio signal comprising data encoded as a sequence of tones; deconvolve the received audio signal based on the impulse response to obtain an input signal; process the input signal using a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to produce bins of magnitudes across the spectrum; apply reverb cancellation values in at least one decoding engine to the bins of magnitudes to remove reverberation from the input signal and obtain the sequence of tones; and after applying the reverb cancellation values, decode the obtained sequence of tones to extract the data (The claims of US 12,154,588 describe a reverberation cancellation value [claims 2, 3, 5, and their medium and method equivalents] but not multiple reverb cancellation values that are applied to bins of magnitudes that are produced by processing an input signal using an FFT, where the input signal is obtained by deconvolving a received audio signal based on an impulse response of an acoustic environment, where the impulse response of the acoustic environment is determined based on an environment measurement signal received in an acoustic environment).
Conclusion
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EY 6/19/2026
/ERIC YEN/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2658
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