DETAILED ACTION
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 2-4, 6-8, 10-12, 14-16 and 18-20 is/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, 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 1, 5, 9, 13 and 17 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Avendano US Pat 9,245,538 in view of Le Roux US PG-Pub 2024/0170003.
Regarding claim 1, 9 and 17, Avendano teaches acquire audio to be processed (Fig. 3-Rx(t)), and obtain first restored audio by restoring, based on a first process, a first type of distortion in the audio to be processed (Fig. 3-310: processing the audio signal using Noise reduction to be output as Rx’(t)); and obtain second restored audio by restoring, based on a second process, a second type of distortion in the first restored audio (Fig. 3-320: processing the audio signal Rx’(t) using Bandwidth expansion to be output as Rx’’(t)).
Avendano failed to explicitly teach processing model.
However, Le Roux teaches processing model (Fig. 1 & [0016]: performing restoration operation using neural network).
Avendano and Le Roux are analogous art because they are both in the same field of endeavor, namely audio processing. Therefore, 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, because using neural network to process audio signal is an alternate equivalent way to process audio signals.
Regarding claim 5 and 13, Avendano teaches wherein the first type of distortion is an additive distortion, and the second type of distortion is an missing distortion (Fig. 3 & Col. 1 line 38-45: reconstruct missing frequencies and performing noise reduction).
While, the combination failed to teach first type distortion being missing and second type of distortion being additive. However, it is an inventor choice to select which type of distortion to use first. With the fact that there are two processes, it would have been obvious to try both different combinations. Therefore, 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.
Conclusion
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/WILLIAM A JEREZ LORA/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2695
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