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
Preliminary Amendment, filed 11/04/2025, has been entered.
Claims 1-20 are pending with claims 1, 4-7, 9-11, 13, and 16-20.
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 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, 13 and 20 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shi et al. (“Shi”) [U.S Patent Application Pub. 2024/0095964 A1] in view of Xu et al. (“Xu”) [U.S Patent Application Pub. 2024/0221426 A1]
Regarding claim 1, Shi meets the claim limitations as follows:
An encoding device [Fig. 1, 2; para. 0115: ‘On an encoder side], comprising:
one or more processors [para. 0069-0072: ‘a processor and a memory’]; and
a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium [para. 0069-0072: ‘a computer-readable storage medium’] coupled to the one or more processors and storing instructions [para. 0069-0072: ‘to store a program’], that when executed by the one or more processors, enable the encoding device to:
obtain a to-be-encoded image [Fig. 2; para. 0115: ‘an original image is input into an encoding network model’];
generate feature maps of C channels [Fig. 2: ‘y’; para. 0115, 0132: ‘to extract features’] based on the to-be-encoded image, wherein the feature maps comprise feature values of a plurality of feature points, and C is a positive integer [Fig. 2: ‘y’; para. 0115, 0132: ‘where C is a quantity of channels of the CNN’];
generate estimated information matrices of the C channels [Fig. 2, 11: output of Hyper decoding network ψ; para. 0116: ‘the prior feature ψ’] based on the feature maps of the C channels;
, wherein N is an integer greater than 1, each channel group comprises k channels, the numbers of channels, k, comprised in any two channel groups are the same or different, and k is a positive integer;
for at least one target channel group in the N channel groups, determine, based on at least one feature value of at least one encoded feature point corresponding to the target channel group and an estimated information matrix corresponding to the target channel group, at least one probability distribution parameter [Fig. 2: Estimated probability distribution; para. 0115-0116, 0132] corresponding to a to-be-encoded feature point corresponding to the target channel group;
determine, based on the at least one probability distribution parameter corresponding to the to-be-encoded feature point, probability distribution [Fig. 2: Estimated probability distribution; para. 0115-0116, 0132] corresponding to the to-be-encoded feature point; and
encode the to-be-encoded feature point into a bitstream based on the probability distribution corresponding to the to-be-encoded feature point [Fig. 2].
Shi does not disclose explicitly the following claim limitations (emphasis added):
group the C channels into N channel groups, wherein N is an integer greater than 1, each channel group comprises k channels, the numbers of channels, k, comprised in any two channel groups are the same or different, and k is a positive integer;
However in the same field of endeavor Xu discloses the deficient claim as follows:
group the C channels into N channel groups [para. 0056, 0058: ‘each feature map into N groups of feature channels’; ‘exchanging an i-th group of feature channels in the i-th feature map with any group of feature channels in the j-th feature map’; para. 0109-0114], wherein N is an integer greater than 1, each channel group comprises k channels, the numbers of channels, k, comprised in any two channel groups are the same or different, and k is a positive integer;
Shi and Xu are combinable because they are from the same field of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) application.
It would have been obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to combine teachings of Shi and Xu as motivation to group the feature channels for object detection and classification for Intelligent video surveillance [para. 0003].
Regarding claim 13, all claim limitations are set forth as claim 1 in the method form and rejected as per discussion for claim 1.
Regarding claim 20, all claim limitations are set forth as claim 1 in the form of “A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing a bitstream and computer instructions” and rejected as per discussion for claim 1.
Allowable Subject Matter
Regarding claims 2-12, they 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.
Regarding claims 14-19, they 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.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. See form 892.
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/PETER D LE/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2488
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