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 Interpretation
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(f):
(f) Element in Claim for a Combination. – An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The claims in this application are given their broadest reasonable interpretation using the plain meaning of the claim language in light of the specification as it would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art. The broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim element (also commonly referred to as a claim limitation) is limited by the description in the specification when 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is invoked.
As explained in MPEP § 2181, subsection I, claim limitations that meet the following three-prong test will be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
(A) the claim limitation uses the term “means” or “step” or a term used as a substitute for “means” that is a generic placeholder (also called a nonce term or a non-structural term having no specific structural meaning) for performing the claimed function;
(B) the term “means” or “step” or the generic placeholder is modified by functional language, typically, but not always linked by the transition word “for” (e.g., “means for”) or another linking word or phrase, such as “configured to” or “so that”; and
(C) the term “means” or “step” or the generic placeholder is not modified by sufficient structure, material, or acts for performing the claimed function.
Use of the word “means” (or “step”) in a claim with functional language creates a rebuttable presumption that the claim limitation is to be treated in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph. The presumption that the claim limitation is interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is rebutted when the claim limitation recites sufficient structure, material, or acts to entirely perform the recited function.
Absence of the word “means” (or “step”) in a claim creates a rebuttable presumption that the claim limitation is not to be treated in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph. The presumption that the claim limitation is not interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is rebutted when the claim limitation recites function without reciting sufficient structure, material or acts to entirely perform the recited function.
Claim limitations in this application that use the word “means” (or “step”) are being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, except as otherwise indicated in an Office action. Conversely, claim limitations in this application that do not use the word “means” (or “step”) are not being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, except as otherwise indicated in an Office action.
This application includes one or more claim limitations that do not use the word “means,” but are nonetheless being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, because the claim limitation(s) uses a generic placeholder that is coupled with functional language without reciting sufficient structure to perform the recited function and the generic placeholder is not preceded by a structural modifier. Such claim limitation(s) is/are: a surface reconstruction module, a remeshing module, a mesh parameterization module, a semantic surface feature point determination module, and a 3D semantic reconstruction module in claim 8; and as disclosed by Applicant’s Specification (Para 118; Fig. 6) without correspondence to structural components.
Because this/these claim limitation(s) is/are being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, it/they is/are being interpreted to cover the corresponding structure described in the specification as performing the claimed function, and equivalents thereof.
If applicant does not intend to have this/these limitation(s) interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, applicant may: (1) amend the claim limitation(s) to avoid it/them being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph (e.g., by reciting sufficient structure to perform the claimed function); or (2) present a sufficient showing that the claim limitation(s) recite(s) sufficient structure to perform the claimed function so as to avoid it/them being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph.
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.
Claims 1-8 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.
Claims 1 and 8 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential steps, such omission amounting to a gap between the steps. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted steps are: The 3D point cloud data of the crop leaf is acquired as disclosed by Applicant’s Specification (Para 147), such that point cloud acquisition occurs prior to processing data based on the point cloud.
Accordingly, claims 2-7 are rejected based on dependency from a rejected base claim.
Claims 1-8 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential elements, such omission amounting to a gap between the elements. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted elements are: a processor coupled with a storage medium including a software product that executes the claimed method steps, as Applicant’s Specification (Para 148, 154; Fig. 7) discloses.
Accordingly, claims 2-7 are rejected based on dependency from a rejected base claim.
Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential structural cooperative relationships of elements, such omission amounting to a gap between the necessary structural connections. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted structural cooperative relationships are: the communicative coupling of a surface reconstruction module, a remeshing module, a mesh parameterization module, a semantic surface feature point determination module, and a 3D semantic reconstruction module as disclosed by Applicant’s Specification (Fig. 6).
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(d):
(d) REFERENCE IN DEPENDENT FORMS.—Subject to subsection (e), a claim in dependent form shall contain a reference to a claim previously set forth and then specify a further limitation of the subject matter claimed. A claim in dependent form shall be construed to incorporate by reference all the limitations of the claim to which it refers.
The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, fourth paragraph:
Subject to the following paragraph [i.e., the fifth paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112], a claim in dependent form shall contain a reference to a claim previously set forth and then specify a further limitation of the subject matter claimed. A claim in dependent form shall be construed to incorporate by reference all the limitations of the claim to which it refers.
Claims 9-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(d) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, 4th paragraph, as being of improper dependent form for failing to further limit the subject matter of the claim upon which it depends, or for failing to include all the limitations of the claim upon which it depends. Claims 9 and 10 respectively recite an “electronic device” and a “non-transitory computer-readable storage medium”, which do not constitute a further limitation of the same statutory category as the three-dimensional (3D) semantic reconstruction method, as recited in claim 1. Applicant may cancel the claim(s), amend the claim(s) to place the claim(s) in proper dependent form, rewrite the claim(s) in independent form, or present a sufficient showing that the dependent claim(s) complies with the statutory requirements.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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 the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) as being anticipated by Xifeng Gao et al., US 12,505,621 B2.
Independent claim 1, Gao discloses a three-dimensional (3D) semantic reconstruction method of a leaf, comprising:
performing surface reconstruction on 3D point cloud data of a crop leaf based on scale-space surface reconstruction to obtain an initial mesh of the crop leaf (Fig. 2);
remeshing the initial mesh based on isotropic remeshing to obtain a 3D mesh of the crop leaf (i.e. re-meshing, which ignores an original mesh structure and generates a new mesh from scratch – col. 4, ll. 50-52; A marching cubes (MC) algorithm was proposed for reconstructing iso-surfaces - col. 6, ll. 33-34; To capture sharp features of an iso-surface, an extended marching cubes method (EMC) can be used to insert additional feature points – col. 6, ll. 44-46; The purpose of the mesh extraction stage is to generate a “clean” proxy mesh M.sub.d of the input M.sub.i that possibly has “dirty” topology and geometry configurations – col.9, ll. 64-67);
mapping the 3D mesh to a two-dimensional (2D) space based on as rigid as possible (ARAP) mesh parameterization to obtain a 2D mesh of the crop leaf (i.e. an extracted iso-surface (416) based on a feature vertex (426) and an extracted iso-surface (418) based on a feature vertex (424) can intersect. To address the issue of intersections, a feature vertex can be constrained within a sub-space of a voxel to guarantee the extracted mesh to be free of self-intersection. A sub-space of a voxel can be constructed for each feature point by simply inserting a set of cutting planes to the voxel. While FIG. 4 shows the sub-space construction strategy in 2D – Fig. 4; col. 12, ll. 48-57);
determining edge points of the crop leaf based on a number of neighborhood points to each vertex in the 2D mesh (i.e. determining feature points and recover feature edges – Fig. 4, 7; col.13, ll. 25-27 - based on edge flip operations that include performing intersection checks with neighboring edges – col. 13, ll. 34-37; col. 13-14, ll. 67-6), and performing 2D semantic interpolation on the 2D mesh based on the edge points to obtain semantic surface feature points of the 2D mesh (i.e. At step 13, a feature alignment process can be performed on the M.sub.o, for example based on the algorithm 6. – Table 7, Table 8); and
performing, based on corresponding points of the semantic surface feature points in the 3D mesh, 3D semantic reconstruction on the crop leaf to obtain a 3D semantic mesh model of the crop leaf (i.e. reconstruct a new mesh mimicking the original mesh; The methods to completely reconstruct a new mesh mimicking the original one can be classified by a main feature of the methods, such as voxelization-based re-meshing, primitive fitting, visual-driven, and learning-based – col. 5, ll. 34-42).
Claim 2, Gao discloses the 3D semantic reconstruction method of a leaf according to claim 1, wherein the performing, based on corresponding points of the semantic surface feature points in the 3D mesh, 3D semantic reconstruction on the crop leaf to obtain a 3D semantic mesh model of the crop leaf comprises: determining proximal points at shortest Euclidean distances with the semantic surface feature points in the 2D mesh (i.e. When the mesh flow process is actually applied for each vertex v in M.sub.o, an Euclidean-distance-wise closest point – col. 17-18, ll. 64-6; Table 4; determining corresponding points of the proximal points in the 3D mesh (i.e. a closest vertex {tilde over (v)} of a vertex v of the simplified mesh M.sub.s can be determined in the input mesh (e.g., M.sub.i) – Table 6; col. 18, ll. 20-25); connecting the corresponding points to obtain the 3D semantic mesh model of the crop leaf (Fig. 2).
Claim 3, Gao discloses the 3D semantic reconstruction method of a leaf according to claim 2, wherein the connecting the corresponding points to obtain the 3D semantic mesh model of the crop leaf comprises: connecting each row of corresponding points in the 3D mesh to obtain multiple connected rows (Fig. 12); and connecting adjacent rows of corresponding points in the multiple connected rows to form quadrilaterals (Fig. 12), and connecting diagonals of the quadrilaterals to obtain the 3D semantic mesh model of the crop leaf (Fig. 12).
Claim 4, Gao discloses the 3D semantic reconstruction method of a leaf according to claim 1, after the determining edge points of the crop leaf based on a number of neighborhood points to each vertex in the 2D mesh, further comprising: constructing a 2D coordinate system (i.e. a feature vertex can be constrained within a sub-space of a voxel to guarantee the extracted mesh to be free of self-intersection. A sub-space of a voxel can be constructed for each feature point by simply inserting a set of cutting planes to the voxel. While FIG. 4 shows the sub-space construction strategy in 2D – Fig. 4; col. 12, ll. 48-57); and
determining oriented bounding box (OBB) information of the edge points, and based on the OBB information (i.e. M.sub.e can be defined as a sub-mesh that includes all updated faces after an edge operation (e.g., edge flip or edge collapse); A remaining portion of the mesh can be denoted as M.sub.r. For example, M.sub.r can include faces (712) and (714) when the edge collapse is applied; whether M.sub.e intersects with M.sub.r can be checked by a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH)-based collision detection – Fig. 7; Table 9), moving the 2D mesh in a plane of the 2D coordinate system, such that a length direction of the 2D mesh is parallel to a Y-axis direction of the 2D coordinate system, and a lowest point of the 2D mesh coincides with an origin of the 2D coordinate system (i.e. check whether a mesh with boundaries has self-intersection, in a related example, a sufficient condition can be provided as follows: let S be a continuous surface, bounded by C, S is self-intersection free if a vector vec exists, such that: (1) Surface Normal Test: for every point p of S, n.sub.p.Math.vec>0, where n.sub.p is the surface normal at p. (2) Contour Test: a projection of the contour C along the vec is not self-intersected. In the related example, a discrete version for triangle meshes can be provided as follows: (1) Surface Normal Test: the angle of the normal cone formed by all triangle face normals is less than π/2. (2) Contour Test: a projection of the mesh boundary C along the normal cone axis is not self-intersected – Table 9).
Claim 5, Gao disclose the 3D semantic reconstruction method of a leaf according to claim 4, wherein the performing 2D semantic interpolation on the 2D mesh based on the edge points to obtain semantic surface feature points of the 2D mesh comprises: transversely dividing the 2D mesh based on the edge points to obtain multiple transverse lines of the 2D mesh (i.e. introduce separating planes to divide a cube and determine feature points - Fig. 19-20); and equally dividing the multiple transverse lines to determine the semantic surface feature points of the 2D mesh (i.e. determining feature points by using the number of cube vertices to divide the voxels in a plane - Fig. 19-20; Fig. 21 “2104”).
Claim 6, Gao discloses the 3D semantic reconstruction method of a leaf according to claim 1, after obtaining the initial mesh of the crop leaf, further comprising: repairing the initial mesh based on a triangular mesh hole-filling algorithm to obtain a repaired initial mesh of the crop leaf (i.e. an input surface is firstly repaired to obtain a high-quality surface mesh – Fig. 9).
Claim 7, Gao discloses the 3D semantic reconstruction method of a leaf according to claim 1, before the performing surface reconstruction on 3D point cloud data of a crop leaf based on scale-space surface reconstruction, further comprising: acquiring the 3D point cloud data of the crop leaf (i.e. detect features in point clouds – col. 5, ll. 50-55), and performing preprocessing on the 3D point cloud data, the preprocessing comprising voxel downsampling, outlier removal (i.e. voxelizations of the dataset to have well-defined in/out segmentation – col. 6, ll. 22-24), and point cloud smoothing.
Independent claim 8, the claim is similar in scope to claim 1. Therefore, similar rationale as applied in the rejection of claim 1 applies herein.
Independent claim 9, the claim is similar in scope to claim 1. Therefore, similar rationale as applied in the rejection of claim 1 applies herein.
Independent claim 10, the claim is similar in scope to claim 1. Therefore, similar rationale as applied in the rejection of claim 1 applies herein.
Claims 11-16, the corresponding rationale as applied in the rejection of claims 2-7 apply herein.
Claims 17-20, the corresponding rationale as applied in the rejection of claims 2-5 apply herein.
Conclusion
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/CHANTE E HARRISON/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2615
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