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 .
This action is in response to the communication filed on January 8, 2025.
Claims 1-20 are pending in this action.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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.
Claim(s) 1, 15, and 18 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Yamanashi et al. (US 8,352,258).
An audio signal processing method (Figure 12, “speech encoding apparatus 700”, Figures 15 and 16, “corrective scale factor encoding section 1072”) comprising:
obtaining a plurality of sub-bands of an audio signal (Figure 15, element 1071) and a scale factor of each sub-band (Figure 15, element 1072, Figure 16, element 1721);
determining, based on scale factors of the plurality of sub-bands, a reference value used for shaping a spectral envelope of the audio signal (description of Figure 16, “ . . . the subsequent processing, parameters in the plurality of subbands are integrated into one vector value. For example, quantity NB of scale factors are represented as one vector”); and
shaping the spectral envelope of the audio signal by using the reference value as a baseline (Figures 15-16 and description of Figures 15-16, “. . . band enhancement encoding section 1007. . .”), to obtain an adjustment factor of each sub-band corresponding to a shaped spectral envelope (description of Figure 16, “Corrective scale factor codebook 1723 stores a plurality of corrective scale factor candidates, and sequentially outputs one of the stored corrective scale factor candidates to multiplier 1724 in accordance with a directive from search section 1728. The plurality of corrective scale factor candidates stored in corrective scale factor codebook 1723 are represented by a vector”), wherein the adjustment factor is used to quantize a spectral value of the audio signal (Description of Figure 16, “A description will be given taking a case in which each processing operation is performed for each of these vectors--that is, a case in which vector quantization is performed--as an example” and “Multiplier 1724 multiplies a first scale factor output from scale factor calculation section 1722 by a corrective scale factor candidate output from corrective scale factor codebook 1723, and provides the multiplication result to subtracter 1725”.), and/or the adjustment factor is used to dequantize a code value of the spectral value (Figure 27, element 103 and Figure 29, elements 202 and 4504).
As per claims 15 and 18, they are analyzed and thus rejected for the same reasons set forth in the rejection of claim 1, because the corresponding claims have similar limitations.
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(s) 8 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Yamanashi et al. (US 8,352,258) as applied to claims 1 above, and further in view of Well-known prior art.
As per claim 8, Yamanashi does not explicitly disclose, wherein when the audio signal is a dual-channel signal, the reference value is obtained based on an average value of the scale factors of the plurality of sub-bands; and when the audio signal is a mono-channel signal, the reference value is obtained based on a maximum value in the scale factors of the plurality of sub-bands.
applicant has not disclosed that dual-channel or mono-channel and are preferable according to a design criterion or solves any stated problem, so that the use of dual-channel or mono-channel would be an arbitrary design choice, since it appears that they all would perform equally well.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Yamanashi by including dual-channel or mono-channel as design choice for the choice of the dual-channel or mono-channel is routine experimentation and optimization in the absence of criticality.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-7, 9-14, 16-17, and 19-20 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.
Chmounk et al. (US 7,333,929) discloses, Modular scalable compressed audio data stream.
Mchrotra et al. (US 2005/0165611) discloses, Efficient coding of digital media spectral data using wide-sense perceptual similarity.
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Abul K. Azad whose telephone number is (571) 272-7599. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Bhavesh Mehta, can be reached at (571) 272-7453.
Any response to this action should be mailed to:
Commissioner for Patents
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
Or faxed to: (571) 273-8300.
Hand-delivered responses should be brought to 401 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA-22314 (Customer Service Window).
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August 5, 2026
/ABUL K AZAD/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2656
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