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 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 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)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(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.
Claims 1-3, 11, 13-15 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by D1.1
With regard to claim 1, D1 teach method for video processing applied to a decoder (see abstract, fig. 1: in-loop filter is implemented in a HEVC decoder), the method comprising: receiving an input image (see fig. 1); processing the input image by one or more convolution layers (see fig. 1, § 2.2: convolution layers); processing the input image by multiple residual blocks by using partition information of the input image as reference so as to obtain reference information features (see fig. 1, 4: each SIF implements a residual block); generating different-scales features based on the reference information features and processing the different-scales features by multiple convolutional layer sets (see fig. 1: SIF is generated by SIFE at different levels, i.e., different scales); processing the different-scales features by reference spatial attention blocks (RSABs) so as to form a combined feature (see fig. 1: SIFE considered as a reference spatial attention block); and concatenating the combined feature with the reference information features so as to form an output image (see fig. 1: addition of extracted features with the combined features followed by CNN, p. 3 col 1: concatenating operation).
With regard to claim 2, D1 teach method of claim 1, wherein the one or more convolution layers belong to a feature extraction part of a framework (see fig. 1: LFE).
With regard to claim 3, D1 teach method of claim 1, wherein the multiple residual blocks belong to a reference information generation (RIG) part of a framework (see fig. 1, 4).
With regard to claim 11, D1 teach method of claim 1, wherein the combined feature is concatenated by a reconstruction part of a framework (see fig. 1: final addition).
With regard to claims 13-15, see discussion of claims 1-3, respectively.
With regard to claim 20, see discussion of claim 1.
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 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 12 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over D1.
With regard to claim 12, D1 teach method of claim 11, but fails to explicitly teach wherein the reconstruction part includes three branch paths for processing luma and chroma components, respectively. However, one skilled in the art would have found it obvious to process the three different components of Y, U and V color model resulting in predictable and enhanced results. Alternatively, Examiner also take Official Notice to the fact that it is extremely well known in the art before the effective filing date to process the color components separately and one skilled in the art would have found it obvious to incorporate known teachings into the configuration of D1 yielding predictable and enhanced results.
Claims 4-10 and 16-19 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.
Pertinent Art
Vlutters et al.2 is related to process for converting an arbitrary input digital pathology image into an output digital pathology image that shares statistical information with a reference image.
Conclusion
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/AVINASH YENTRAPATI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2672
1 Wang, Dezhao, et al. "Partition tree guided progressive rethinking network for in-loop filtering of HEVC." 2019 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). IEEE, 2019.
2 US Publication No. 2021/115941.
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