DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
1. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Notice to Applicants
2. This communication is in response to the application filled on 01/22/2025.
3. Claims 1-20 are pending.
4. Limitations appearing inside {} are intended to indicate the limitations not taught by said prior art(s)/combinations.
Information Disclosure Statement
5. The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 03/03/2025 has been considered by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
8. 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.
9. Claims 1, 6-8, 13-15, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by WO-2023/172457-A1 to Mammou et al. (hereinafter Mammou).
10. Regarding Claim 1, Mammou discloses a method comprising ([par. 0003, ln. 1-11] “Disclosed herein are methods and apparatuses for image/video-based compression static and dynamic meshes. Specifically, disclosed herein are pre-processing remeshing techniques that can improve compression efficiency for 3D meshes. A re-meshing pre-processor for remeshing a 3D textured mesh M(i) to generate a base mesh m(i) and displacement field d(i) for input into a mesh encoder, can include a Mesh Decimation module that includes processing hardware that reduces the number of vertices or faces of input mesh M(i), or a mesh derived therefrom, while substantially preserving the shape of the input mesh M(i), thereby producing a decimated mesh dm(i) and a projected mesh P(i); and a Fitting Subdivision Surface module that includes processing hardware that processes the input mesh M(i), the decimated mesh dm(i) or a mesh derived therefrom, and the projected mesh P(i) to produce a base mesh m(i) and the displacement field d(i) for input into a mesh encoder.”):
decoding, from a bitstream, unpacking information indicating one or more packing indications for displacements associated with a subset of vertices of a set of vertices of a three-dimensional mesh ([par. 0067, ln. 1-19] “Depending on the application and the targeted bitrate/visual quality, the encoder could optionally encode a set of displacement vectors associated with the subdivided mesh vertices, referred to as displacement field d(i). One technique for computing a displacement field d(i) is described in Section 2, below. The reconstructed quantized base mesh m’(i) can then be used by displacement updater 1004 to update the displacement field d(i) to generate an updated displacement field d’(i) that takes into account the differences between the reconstructed base mesh m’(i) and the original base mesh m(i). By exploiting the subdivision surface mesh structure (as described below), a wavelet transform 1005 (as described below) can then applied to d’(i), generating a set of wavelet coefficients e(i). The wavelet coefficients e(i) can then be quantized 1006 (producing quantized wavelet coefficients e’(i)), packed into a 2D image/video by image packer 1007, and compressed by using an image/video encoder 1008. The encoding of the wavelet coefficients may be lossless or lossy. The reconstructed version of the wavelet coefficients can be obtained by applying image unpacking 1009 and inverse quantization 1010 to the reconstructed wavelet coefficients video generated during the video encoding process. Reconstructed displacements d”(i) can then be computed by applying the inverse wavelet transform 1011 to the reconstructed wavelet coefficients. A reconstructed base mesh m”(i) can be obtained by applying inverse quantization 1012 to the reconstructed quantized base mesh m’(i). The reconstructed deformed mesh DM(i) can be obtained by subdividing m”(i) and applying the reconstructed displacements d”(i) to its vertices by reconstruction block 1013. Subdivision Scheme”, [par. 0074, ln. 1-12] “Various strategies could be employed for packing the wavelet coefficients into a 2D image. Figure 15 illustrates one such strategy, which can proceed as follows:… First, it traverses the coefficients from low to high frequency… Then, for each coefficient, it then determines the index of the NxM pixel block (e.g., N=M=16) in which it should be stored following a raster order for blocks… Finally, the position within the NxM pixel block can be computed by using a Morton order (see Reference [A9]) to maximize locality (see Figure 16 for details). The example of Fig. 15 is but one example implementation, and other packing scheme s/strategies are possible and contemplated. In a particular embodiment, the values of N and M could be chosen as a power of 2, which makes it possible to avoid division in the scheme described in Figures 15 and 16. Figure 16 is but one example implementation of a Morton order computation, and other implementations are possible and contemplated.”, [par. 0083, ln. 1-9] “The displacement sub-stream can be decoded by a video/image decoder 1804 corresponding to the video/image encoder used to encode the sub-stream. The generated image/video can then un-packed 1805 and inverse quantization 1806 can be applied to the wavelet coefficients that result from the unpacking. Any video codec/standard could be used with the techniques described herein. For example, image/video codecs such as HEVC/H.265 AVC/H.264, AVI, AV2, JPEG, JPEG2000, etc. could be leveraged. Use of such video codecs can allow the mesh encoding and decoding techniques described herein to take advantage of well-developed encoding and decoding algorithms that are implemented in hardware on a wide variety of platforms, thus providing high performance and high power efficiency.”, [Fig. 17, see Wavelet Transformation and inverse wavelet transform]);
decoding, from the bitstream, an image comprising wavelet coefficients representing the displacements of the subset of vertices ([par. 0067, ln. 1-19], [par. 0074, ln. 1-12], [par. 0083, ln. 1-9], [Fig. 17, see Wavelet Transformation and inverse wavelet transform]); and
unpacking, based on the one or more packing indications associated with the subset, the wavelet coefficients from the image to determine the displacements (par. 0067, ln. 1-19], [par. 0074, ln. 1-12], [par. 0083, ln. 1-9], [Fig. 17, see Wavelet Transformation and inverse wavelet transform]).
11. Regarding Claim 6, Mammou discloses the method of claim 1. Mammou further discloses wherein the set of vertices comprises non-overlapping subsets of vertices with the subset being one of the non-overlapping subsets ([par. 00432, ln. 1-3] “…the non-overlapped vertex indices are saved into the list by the order of the size. In the same example above, the associated vertices are ordered as 0,1, 2, 4, 5. The first displacement is added to vertex0(x0,y0,z0) and the last displacement is added to vertex5(x5,y5,z5). For patch[l], the associated vertices are ordered as 2,5,3.”, [par. 00437, ln. 1-7] “The list of vertices is created from the triangle faces (with the same facegroup id) associated with the current patch. The non-overlapping vertex indices are saved into the list based on the order of their appearance. In the example of Figure 40, the associated vertices are ordered as 1,2, 4, 5, 0,3. Then, the first displacement (at ath_geometry_2d_pos_x, ath_geometry_2d_pos_y ) is added to vertex l(xl,yl,zl) and the last displacement is added to vertex3(x3,y3,z3). In some embodiments, the non-overlapped vertex indices are saved into a list by the order of their size.”), and wherein the non-overlapping subsets correspond to: levels of detail (LODs); sub-meshes of the three-dimensional mesh; or patches in a sub-mesh of the sub-meshes ([par. 00424, ln. 1-3] “The pixel values in the geometry image corresponding to each patch (e.g., patch 0 in Figure 38) are converted to the displacements and added to vertices in the corresponding area in the base mesh(in this example, patch 0 in Figure 35).”, [par. 00430, ln. 1-10] “To illustrate this, Figure 40 provides an example of vertex indices in a subpart associated with a patch. Looking at the example of Figure 40, if a patch (mesh_intra_patch_data_unit[O]) has subpart_id 0, then triangle faces with fi(facegroupld) 0 are associated with this patch, which are f 1/2/4, f 2/4/5 and f 0/1/2. As illustrated in the example of Figure 40, in some embodiments, this correlation between triangle faces and facegroupld’s may be indicated via a correlated ordering between a listing of the triangle faces and a list of associated facegroupld’s. For example, in Figure 40, the ordered list of triangle faces (e.g., f 1/2/4, f 2/4/5, f 2/5/3, and f 0/1/2) and corresponding ordered list of facegroupld’s (e.g., fl 0, fi 0, fi 1, and fiO) indicate that each of f 1/2/4, f 2,/4/5, and f 0/1/2) are associated with facegroupld 0 and that triangle face f 2/5/3 is associated with facegroupld 1.”, [Fig. 35, see various subdivisions/meshes and patch0-2]).
12. Regarding Claim 7, Mammou discloses the method of claim 1. Mammou further discloses wherein the wavelet coefficients are quantized-transformed wavelet coefficients stored in respective pixels of the image ([par. 0067, ln. 1-19] see “The wavelet coefficients e(i) can then be quantized 1006 (producing quantized wavelet coefficients e’(i)), packed into a 2D image/video by image packer 1007, and compressed by using an image/video encoder 1008.”, [par. 0074, ln. 1-12], [par. 0083, ln. 1-9]).
13. Regarding Claim 8, the claim language is analogous to claim 1, with the exception of “A decoder comprising: one or more processors; and memory storing instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the decoder to” perform the method analogous to claim 1. Mammou further discloses a decoder comprising: one or more processors; and memory storing instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the decoder to perform the method ([par. 00457, ln 1-7] “The processor core complex 4308 is operably coupled with local memory 4310 and the main memory storage device 4312. Thus, the processor core complex 4308 may execute instructions stored in local memory 4310 or the main memory storage device 4312 to perform operations, such as generating or transmitting image data to display on the electronic display 4302. As such, the processor core complex 4308 may include one or more general purpose microprocessors, one or more application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), one or more field programmable logic arrays (FPGAs), or any combination thereof.”). Regarding the remainder of claim 8, rejections analogous to claim 1 are further applicable.
14. Regarding Claims 13 and 14, Mammou discloses the decoder device of claim 8. The claim language of claims 13 and 14 is analogous to claims 6 and 7 respectively. Rejections analogous to claim 6 and 7 are further applicable to claims 13 and 14 in view of the decoder device of Mammou.
15. Regarding Claim 15, the claim language is analogous to claim 1, with the exception of “A non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a decoder, cause the decoder to:” perform the method analogous to claim 1. Mammou further discloses a non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a decoder, cause the decoder to perform the method ([par. 00457, ln 1-7], [par. 00458, ln. 1-8] “...the local memory 4310 or the main memory storage device 4312 may store data to be processed by the processor core complex 4308. Thus, the local memory 4310 and/or the main memory storage device 4312 may include one or more tangible, non-transitory, computer-readable media. For example, the local memory 4310 may include random access memory (RAM) and the main memory storage device 4312 may include read-only memory (ROM), rewritable non-volatile memory such as flash memory, hard drives, optical discs, or the like.”). Regarding the remainder of claim 8, rejections analogous to claim 1 are further applicable.
16. Regarding Claim 20, Mammou discloses the non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 15. The claim language of claims 20 is analogous to claims 6. Rejections analogous to claim 6 are further applicable to claims 20 in view of the non-transitory computer-readable medium of Mammou.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
17. 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.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
18. Claims 2, 4, 9, 11, 16, and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over WO-2023/172457-A1 to Mammou and further in view of “DCT-based color image compression algorithm using adaptive block scanning” to Messaoudi et al. (hereinafter Messaoudi).
19. Regarding Claim 2, Mammou discloses the method of claim 1. Mammou further discloses wherein the one or more packing indications {comprise an indication of a packing scheme, from} a plurality of packing schemes, for packing wavelet coefficients in a packing block of the image ([par. 0074, ln. 1-12]). Specifically, the examiner notes that while Mammou discloses wherein multiple packing schemes are feasible, Mammou only specified a Morton packing scheme and does not specifically disclose that the packing indications comprise an indication of a packing scheme to be used.
However, Messaoudi specifically discloses wherein packing indications comprise an indication of a packing scheme from a plurality of packing schemes ([pg. 1443, col. 1, 3 Proposed lossless encoder, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 1, ln. 18] “The proposed approach is a simple and efficient encoding method. It combines the adaptive scan technique and the run length encoder (RLE). After the thresholding process and the quantization step, the proposed lossless encoder encodes the resulted DCT coefficients. Firstly, the DCT coefficients block is ordered and transformed in a vector following a scan. Several scan orders can be found in the literature such as zigzag and hilbert. In this study, four scans are used, namely zigzag, horizontal, vertical and hilbert as an adaptive block scanning. To encode efficiently the DCT coefficients vector, for each scan, the proposed encoder generates two vectors. The first vector is the nonzero DCT block coefficients (NZ) vector. The second is an index vector called
I
D
X
i
(
i
=
1
…
4
)
that contains the numbers of zeros that precede a NZ DCT coefficient. A scan is characterized by its
I
D
X
i
vector, which is represented by its maximum value. Since that each scan will be coded according to a number of bits, which depends of maximum value of its
I
D
X
i
vector, the retained scan is the scan that has the minimum value among the four
I
D
X
i
vectors. This retained scan uses certainly the smallest encoder to encode the run of zeros sequence that precedes a nonzero (NZ) DCT coefficient. For this, a field, called AS of two (2) bits (“00,” “01,” “10” or “11”), is used to represent the selected scan order. As an example, if the zigzag scan is retained, AS is affected by the value “00.” As depicted in Fig. 2, the encoded image bitstream is composed of the Global Header defining the control bits, and two other vectors including the NZ coefficients and the correspondent
I
D
X
i
vectors.”, [pg. 1444, col. 1, 3.1 Differential DC encoding, par. 1, ln. 1 to par. 3, ln. 8] “The DC coefficient is a measure of the average value of the all pixels within the block. Generally, DC coefficient contains an important fraction of the total energy image and for this, the AC coefficients are treated separately from the DC coefficient. Typically, there is high correlation between the averages of adjacent blocks in an image. In this sense, it is more efficient to code the DC difference (Differential DC encoding) rather than coding the quantized DC coefficient itself and can lead to good compression ratios [5]. Mainly, entropy coding is an important step of any compression algorithm. It achieves additional compression by encoding resulted vectors more compactly based on their statistical characteristics. Moreover, it is easy to notice that a wide difference of values between the image bitstream sections (Fig. 2) exists. Therefore, it is more appropriate to encode them separately. An arithmetic encoder, as an entropy encoder, is individually applied to each part of the Global Header, the NZ vectors and the IDX vectors for more loss less compression. The procedure deciding the scan order to adapt is so simple. The encoding procedure pseudo-code is given in Algorithm 1. This latter is organized as two consecutive loops. The first loop generates the
N
Z
i
and
i
d
x
N
Z
i
vec tors containing the NZ DCT coefficients and their indices, while the second calculates the vector
I
D
X
i
. The time complexity of such procedure is O(n). The decoding algorithm pseudo-code is described in Algorithm 2.”, [pg. 1444, col. 2, Algorithm 1 and Algorithm 2] specifically, see Algorithm 1 step C., Finding AS the index of the best scan and Algorithm 2 step B. Choose the correspondent scan order V following AS.). One of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would specifically recognize Mammou and Messaoudi as within the same field of encoding and decoding using wavelet transformations, and as analogous to the claimed invention. The motivation to combine would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, in that by using an packing indication to indicate a selection from a plurality of packing schemes as taught in Messaoudi, you can effectively expand the adaptability and applicability of the model and allow for the ability to optimize scan order to reduce bit requirements (e.g., size of data blocks directly affects which scan may be more efficient, as well as affects the ability of the decoder to effectively predict the corresponding neighboring blocks from previously decoded block which directly affects the resultant bits in intra encoding). The examiner likewise notes that various encoding standards as taught in a Mammou ([par. 0083, ln. 1-9]) use different packing schemes (e.g., see PTO-892, ITU-T H.265 08/2021 section 6.5, specifically 6.5.2-6.5.6, which describe Z-scan, up-right diagonal scan, horizontal scan, vertical scan, and traverse scan order) and already offer a similar selection from various packing schemes. One of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a selection from a plurality of packing schemes as taught in Messaoudi, through known means, with no change to their respective function, and the combination would have yielded nothing more than predicable results. Specifically, one of ordinary skill in the art would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a selection from a plurality of packing schemes as taught in Messaoudi such that the packing indications of Mammou further included a indication as to which packing scheme was to be used.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, to combine the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a selection from a plurality of packing schemes as taught in Messaoudi to obtain the invention as specified in claim 2.
20. Regarding Claim 4, Mammou disclose the method of claim 1. Mammou discloses wherein the one or more packing indications comprise an indication of a traversal orientation of packing within a packing block of the image ([par. 0074, ln. 1-12]), and {wherein the traversal orientation is one of a horizontal direction or a vertical direction}. Mammou does not specifically disclose wherein the traversal orientation is one of a horizontal direction or a vertical direction.
However, Messaoudi specifically teaches wherein the wherein the traversal orientation is one of a horizontal direction or a vertical direction ([pg. 1443, col. 1, 3 Proposed lossless encoder, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 1, ln. 18], [pg. 1444, col. 1, 3.1 Differential DC encoding, par. 1, ln. 1 to par. 3, ln. 8], [pg. 1444, col. 2, Algorithm 1 and Algorithm 2]). The motivation to combine remains analogous to claim 2. One of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a horizontal or vertical direction for traversal orientation of Messaoudi, through known means, with no change to their respective function, and the combination would have yielded nothing more than predicable results. Specifically, one of ordinary skill in the art would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a horizontal or vertical direction for traversal orientation of Messaoudi such that the packing indications of Mammou further included an indication as to if the traversal orientation was in a horizontal or vertical direction.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, to combine the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a horizontal or vertical direction for traversal orientation of Messaoudi to obtain the invention as specified in claim 4.
21. Regarding Claims 9, 11, 16, and 18, Mammou discloses the decoder device and non-transitory computer-readable medium of claims 8 and 15. Rejections analogous to claims 2 and 4 are further applicable to claim 9 and 11 and claims 16 and 18 respectively in view of the analogous claim language. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, to combine the decoder device and non-transitory computer-readable medium of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a selection from a plurality of packing schemes and traversal orientation including horizontal and vertical directions as taught in Messaoudi to obtain the invention as specified in claims 9, 11, 16, and 18.
22. Claim 3 and 5 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over WO-2023/172457-A1 to Mammou and further in view of “Intra Prediction using Adaptive TU Scan Order with Residue Flipping” to Iwamura et al. (hereinafter Iwamura).
23. Regarding Claim 3, Mammou discloses the method of claim 1. Mammou discloses wherein the one or more packing indications comprise an indication {of a traversal origin} of packing within a packing block of the image, and wherein the traversal origin is a corner in the packing block ([par. 0074, ln. 1-12]). Specifically, one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would recognize the NxM block traversal and Morton code of Mammou to be analogous to traversing the NxM pixel block by the corner of the block. This is specifically because a Morton code typically traverses a block as a Z or zigzag shape, such that beginning and end of the Z is the upper left hand and bottom right-hand corner of a given block. This would have been known to one of ordinary skill in the art, and is also substantiated by the reference A9 of Mammou (see PTO-892, Z-order curve Wikipedia, 26, February 2023, which displays various examples of Morton code). Mammou does not specifically disclose wherein an packing indication is for a traversal origin within a packing block.
However, Iwamura specifically teaches packing indications comprise an indication of a traversal origin for a packing block ([pg. 2, col. 1, II. Block partitioning and processing order, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 1, ln. 32] “In HEVC, the sequential order of CTUs that partition a picture is identical to a raster scan order, where CTUs are encoded from the top row to the bottom, and inside the row, encoded from left to right. CTUs can be divided into quadtree CUs by maximally three levels of hierarchy, and intra/inter prediction can be switched at CU level. CUs are further split into PUs. Note that a PU partitioning of an intra CU is only allowed for the smallest CUs (SCUs: normally 8 8) and in such case, no more TU partitioning can be applied. For CUs larger than SCU, PU partitioning is not allowed and the size of the PU is identically same as that of the CU. Instead, the PU can be divided hierarchically into quadtree TUs (minimally 4 4). The partitioning of CUs, PUs, and TUs is controlled by encoder decision. The order of those units is identical to a z scan order which is defined for scanning hierarchically divided quadtrees. Quadtree blocks on the same hierarchical level are scanned from top-left to bottom-right. In case that one of the those blocks is also divided into the higher hierarchical level, the quadtrees of the higher level are scanned earlier. Figure 2 illustrates an example of hierarchical quadtree division of a block, where black arrow indicates the z-scan order of the divided quadtrees. Intra predicted samples are generated by referring to the previously decoded samples located in immediately neighboring left column and top row of the current TU. With successive predicting operation, a part of reference samples is frequently not available since neighboring TUs including reference samples are not decoded yet. For example, in case that the intra PU is divided into one level of quadtree TUs, encoding process is performed successively from the top-left TU to the bottom-right TU. Figure 3 illustrates examples of intra prediction of top-right and bottom-left TUs, where the grey block indicates the target TU to be predicted, and white and black pixels indicate available and unavailable reference samples, respectively. In the figure, we assume that the reference samples located outside of the current PU are available. In the Fig. 3 (a), the reference samples located in the bottom-left TU is not available because the bottom-left TU is not decoded at this point. In such case, the reference sample substitution process is applied. The value of the unavailable reference samples are replaced by that of the immediately neighboring available reference sample labeled as
α
. As a result of substitution, if the intra prediction mode 2 is applied to the current TU, most of the predicted samples is the same even though the selected intra prediction mode is angular mode. The intra prediction by mostly unavailable reference samples severely degrades its prediction accuracy. This degradation might appear when the selected intra prediction direction points to bottom-left side. Meanwhile, when the bottom-left TU is predicted, all the reference samples are available as shown in Fig. 3 (b). However, the upper neighboring reference samples are not used for the predicting operation of intra prediction mode 2.”, [pg. 2, col. 2, III. Direction-Dependent Scan Order, par. 1, ln. 1 to pg. 3, col. 1, par. 1, ln. 18] “To avoid inaccurate intra prediction, we propose a modification of the TU z-scan order depending on the intra prediction direction. To simplify, in this paper, the angular intra prediction modes are classified into three categories named Cat. A, B, and C which denote intra prediction mode 2-9, 10-26, and 27-34 of HEVC, respectively. The proposed algorithm modifies TU z-scan order into vertically or horizontally reversed when intra prediction direction is set to Cat. A or C. Figure 4 and 5 illustrate the proposed modification of z-scan order for intra prediction Cat. A and C, respectively. If the intra prediction mode is set to Cat. A, the bottom-left TU is firstly predicted. Immediately upper neighboring reference samples are not available because the upper two TUs are not decoded yet. However, these unavailable reference samples are not used for prediction since the vertical reversal of a z-scan order is only applied when the intra prediction mode is set to Cat. A. Meanwhile, for the predicting operation of upper two TUs, immediately lower reference samples can be newly referred since the lower two TUs are already decoded when the upper two TUs are predicted. When a PU is hierarchically divided into TUs, the TUs other than located at the lowermost can refer to lower reference samples as shown in Fig. 6. These accuracy improvements can go for the horizontally reversed case for Cat. C as shown in Fig. 5. The proposed adaptive scan order only affect PUs divided into quadtree TUs whose shared intra prediction mode is selected from Cat. A or C. Thus, when a PU is not divided or its intra prediction mode is selected from Cat. B, the encoding processes including scan order is completely same as the conventional HEVC.”, [pg. 3, col. 1, IV. Residue Flipping for Reversed Scan Order, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 2, ln. 12] “As mentioned in section III, the immediately lower reference samples can be used for prediction for top-left and top-right TUs when the z-scan order is vertically reversed. When the reference sample position is changed by the proposed adaptive scan order, the residue statistics of those TUs may also be changed since prediction accuracy has strong correlation with a distance between reference samples and predicted samples. Table I shows a relationship between the residue statistics, prediction modes and reference sample positions. Figures in the table indicate residue statistics, where darker region nearby reference samples and lighter region far from reference samples are prone to be a small and large residues, respectively. In HEVC, DCT-II and DST-VII are employed as transformation, and DST-VII is applied for small intra TUs. The idea of the use of DST-VII which has a asymmetric basis is coming from the fact that residues nearby reference samples are prone to have small energy. In this paper, a residue flipping according to the reference position is proposed. If the scan order of the divided TUs is determined to be vertically/ horizontally reversed and if the reference sample position includes lower/right side of the current TU, the residues are vertically/horizontally flipped before transform. At the decoder side, the reconstructed residues are also vertically/horizontally flipped after inverse transform.”, [pg. 2, Fig. 1] corresponds to Cat. B (i.e., regular HEVC), wherein the starting position would be top-left to bottom-right, [pg. 3, Fig. 6] corresponds to Cat. A or C, wherein the starting position would be bottom-left to top-right, [pg. 3, Table 1]). One of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would specifically recognize Mammou and Iwamura as within the same field of encoding and decoding using wavelet transformations and HEVC, and as analogous to the claimed invention. Specifically, the motivation to combine is disclosed in Iwamura, wherein by providing an indication to the traversal origin you can effectively improves the accuracy of the encoding/decoding ([pg. 2, col. 1, II. Block partitioning and processing order, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 1, ln. 32], [pg. 4, col. 1, par. 1, ln. 14-18] “The total amount of residual energy was calculated by sum of squared. It is observed that the proposed method can realize the reduction of residual energy by 46% compared with HEVC, in other word, the intra prediction accuracy can be improved by the proposed method”). One of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a traversal origin in Iwamura, through known means, with no change to their respective function, and the combination would have yielded nothing more than predicable results. Specifically, one of ordinary skill in the art would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a traversal origin in Iwamura such that the traversal origin was indicated by packing indication analogous to those already disclosed in Mammou (e.g., a flag, see [Mammou, par. 00294-00301, ln. 1-21] “…atdu patch data present flag indicates there are patch data(patch_information_data()) signalled in the tile. [00295] atdu num deleted patchgroups indicates the number of patch groups not copied from the reference tile. Each patch has a grouplndex and patches with the same group index are considered as in the same group… If atdu_patch_data_present_flag is true, which indicates there are more patch information in the tile, patch_information_data() is signalled and the patch index for the coming patches is started with RefAtduTotalNumPatches[ tilelD ]-atdu_num_deleted_patches when atdu_num_deleted_patches is not 0.”).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a traversal origin in Iwamura to obtain the invention as specified in claim 3.
24. Regarding Claim 5, Mammou discloses the method of claim 1. Mammou discloses wherein the one or more packing indications comprise an indication of a traversal order of packing within a packing block of the image, and wherein the traversal order comprises a normal order ([par. 0074, ln. 1-12]) {or an inverse order}. Specifically, one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would recognize Mammou discloses a regular in order (i.e., top-left to bottom right) traversal order. However, while Mammou discloses an indication of a traversal order, Mammou does not disclose wherein the indication for the traversal order comprises an inverse order.
However, Iwamura specifically teaches wherein the packing indications comprise a traversal order that contains a normal order (i.e., Cat. B of Iwamura) or an inverse order (i.e., Cat A or C of Iwamura) ([pg. 2, col. 1, II. Block partitioning and processing order, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 1, ln. 32], [pg. 2, col. 2, III. Direction-Dependent Scan Order, par. 1, ln. 1 to pg. 3, col. 1, par. 1, ln. 18], [pg. 3, col. 1, IV. Residue Flipping for Reversed Scan Order, par. 1, ln. 1 to col. 2, par. 2, ln. 12], [pg. 2, Fig. 1] corresponds to Cat. B (i.e., regular HEVC), wherein the starting position would be top-left to bottom-right, [pg. 3, Fig. 6] corresponds to Cat. A or C, wherein the starting position would be bottom-left to top-right, [pg. 3, Table 1]). The motivation to combine remains analogous to claim 3. One of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate traversal order including a normal order and inverse order in Iwamura, through known means, with no change to their respective function, and the combination would have yielded nothing more than predicable results. Specifically, one of ordinary skill in the art would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate traversal orders in Iwamura such that the traversal orders are indicated by packing indication analogous to those already disclosed in Mammou (e.g., a flag, see [Mammou, par. 00294-00301, ln. 1-21]).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the method of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a traversal order of Iwamura to obtain the invention as specified in claim 5.
25. Regarding Claims 10, 12, 17, and 19, Mammou discloses the decoder device and non-transitory computer-readable medium of claims 8 and 15. Rejections analogous to claims 3 and 5 are further applicable to claims 10 and 12 and claims 17 and 19 respectively in view of the analogous claim language. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filling date of the claimed invention, would have combined the decoder device and non-transitory computer-readable medium of Mammou with the packing indication to indicate a traversal origin and order of Iwamura to obtain the invention as specified in claims 10, 12, 17, and 19.
Conclusion
26. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant’s disclosure. See PTO-892.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to PAULO ANDRES GARCIA whose telephone number is (703)756-5493. The examiner can normally be reached Mon-Fri, 8-4:30PM ET.
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/PAULO ANDRES GARCIA/Examiner, Art Unit 2669 /CHAN S PARK/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2669
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