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 .
Priority
The instant application claims priority to and benefit of Chinese Application No. 202411781768.7, filed on 12/05/2024.
Drawings
The 5 page drawings have been considered and placed on record in the file.
Status of Claims
Claims 1-16 are currently pending.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefore, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claim 10 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter as follows.
Claim 10 is directed to "A computer-readable storage medium …". Page 26, paragraph 2 of Applicant’s specification recites certain non-limiting examples of a computer-readable storage medium. It should be noted that Applicant may rebut the presumption of plain meaning by clearly disavowing the full scope of the claim term in the specification; but the disavowal must be clear and unmistakable; and statements directed to claim construction itself are not special definitions or disavowals. See Subject Matter Eligibility of Computer Readable Media, 1351 OG 212 (26 Jan 2010). See MPEP 2111.01. Signals are nothing but the physical characteristics of a form of energy, and as such is non-statutory natural phenomena. See, e.g., In re Nuitjen, 500 F. 3d 1346, 1357 (Fed. Cir. 2007)(slip. op. at 18)("A transitory, propagating signal like Nuitjen's is not a process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.' Thus, such a signal cannot be patentable subject matter."). Accordingly, claim 10 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. It is suggested that Applicant amend the claim by inserting the term “non-transitory” before “computer-readable” in the preamble of the claim.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-9 and 11-16 are allowed. Claim 10 is not rejected over prior art, and will be allowed once the above-described rejection of this claim under 35 U.S.C. 101 is overcome.16 are allowed. The following is an examiner’s statement for reasons for allowance: consider Claim 1, the closest prior art with the same field of endeavor, Flick (US 10137984 BI filed on 08/12/2016), teaches “A structure detection method for a (Flick; Figure 8 (See figure below); Step 802) “and performing global path planning through a dual-mode adaptive confined space disease detection path planning algorithm to generate a precise detection path” (Flick; Figure 8 (See figure below); Step 806) (Flick; Figure 8 (See figure below); Step 808) “through a (Flick; Col 18, Line 4-16; “The autonomous drone may be configured to: collect or generate sensor data from the one or more drone-mounted sensors, the sensor data being associated with the impacted area within the property before, during, and/or after the insurance-related event; estimate an amount of damages to the property and/or insured personal articles from computer analysis of the sensor data (such as by using object recognition or pattern recognition techniques on the sensor data), or input the sensor data into a machine learning program that is trained to determine or estimate damages to property and/or personal articles; and/or generate a proposed insurance claim based upon the estimate amount of damages for the insured's review, approval, and/or modification.” (emphasis added))
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In another analogous field of endeavor, Yeon (KR 101923314 B1 published on 11/28/2018) teaches “…SI, the fixed sensor node network collecting image data of the low-light confined space and generating a basic disease data map;” (Yeon; [0011]; “…the tunnel structure investigation apparatus setting up the flight path of the unmanned aerial vehicle based on the design information about the pre-stored tunnel structure”) and “to obtain a disease map result of a structure of the low-light confined space.” (Yeon; Claim ; Claims; “The tunnel structure irradiating device includes: Evaluating the state of the tunnel structure by judging whether cracks, damages and leakage occur on the surface of the tunnel structure based on the image information, The tunnel structure irradiating device includes: Comparing the image information including the reformation of the surface of the tunnel structure and pre-stored images if it is determined that at least one of cracks, damages and leaks is generated on the surface of the tunnel structure, Determining whether the tunnel structure is caused by external force, material deterioration, or leakage, and evaluating the state of the tunnel structure. If it is determined that cracks have occurred on the surface of the tunnel structure, In order to evaluate the cracks, it is necessary to classify whether the crack corresponds to longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, oblique cracks, or network cracks… classifying whether the leaking area is an arch part corresponding to a ceiling of the tunnel structure or a sidewall or a road surface”)
In another analogous field of endeavor, Wang (“Defect Detection of Subway Tunnels Using Advanced U-Net Network” published on 03/17/2022) teaches a defect detection method using U-net deep learning (Wang; Abstract; “The proposed method has a network design for multi-scale segmentation based on the U-Net architecture including an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module and an inception module, and can detect various types of defects compared to conventional simple CNN-based methods. Through the experiments using a real-world subway tunnel image dataset, the proposed method showed a better performance than that of general semantic segmentation including state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we showed that our method can achieve excellent detection balance among multi-scale defects.”)
The combination of Flick, Yeon, and Wang does not explicitly disclose “a supplementary detection path”. Furthermore, none of the cited prior art references, alone or in combination, provides a motivation to teach the ordered combination of the limitations recited in Claim 1. Claim 1 is thus considered allowable. Claims 2-16 are allowed by virtue of their dependency on Claim 1.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Annie Pham whose telephone number is (571)272-1673. The examiner can be normally be reached Mon-Fri 9:00a – 5:00p.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Amandeep Saini can be reached on (571)272-3382. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/ANNIE H PHAM/Examiner, Art Unit 2662
/Siamak Harandi/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2662
