DETAILED ACTION
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Applicant elected group 1 (claims 1-13) without traverse.
Following is a list of prior arts are considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure, including prior arts not relied upon in the rejection
B. Chen, Z. Wang, B. Li, R. Lin, S. Wang and Y. Ye, "Beyond Keypoint Coding: Temporal Evolution Inference with Compact Feature Representation for Talking Face Video Compression," 2022 Data Compression Conference (DCC), Snowbird, UT, USA, 2022, pp. 13-22 (Chen)
US 20220156981 A1 (Oquab)
US 20250232478 A1 (Fig.3, para 66, 87)
US 20230065862 A1 (scalable feature decoder Fig.7, 8)
Claim Objection (Allowable Subject Matter)
Claims 6-7 and 12-13 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.
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.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied 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.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-5, 8-11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Chen in view of Oquab.
Regarding Claim 1. Chen teaches 1. A computing system, comprising: one or more processors, and a computer-readable storage medium communicatively coupled to the one or more processors, the computer-readable storage medium storing computer-readable instructions executable by the one or more processors that [(section 3.1 )], when executed by the one or more processors, perform associated operations comprising: extracting a key-reference feature having a granularity [(section 2.1-2.2, key frame feature and inter frame feature, key frame is reference frame in inter frame prediction )] generating a dense motion map and an occlusion map based on the key-reference feature and based on an inter frame feature of a plurality of inter frames of the video sequence, wherein the key-reference feature and the inter frame feature have a same granularity: [(section 2.3, equation 4 & 5 )] and reconstructing the video sequence based on the decoded key frame, the dense motion map and the occlusion map by a generative face video compression (“GFVC”) model. [(section 2.4; using deep generative network model for face video compression )]
Chen does not explicitly show that the feature having a granularity of a plurality of granularities
However, in the same/related field of endeavor, Oquab teaches feature having a granularity of a plurality of granularities [( para 17 and 16)]
Therefore, in light of above discussion it would have been obvious to one of the ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to combine the teaching of the prior arts because such combination would improve the system’s flexibility by adapting to different communication channel’s bandwidth [(Oquab para 17 )]
2. The computing system of claim 1, wherein extracting the key-reference feature having a granularity of a plurality of heterogeneous granularities comprises: selecting the granularity of the plurality of heterogeneous granularities based on available bitrate for transmission in a bitstream. [(Oquab para 17, granularity based on bandwidth )]
3. The computing system of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise: reconstructing the decoded key frame from a transmitted bitstream: and outputting a decoded inter frame feature having the granularity from a transmitted bitstream. [(Chen section 2.3 )]
4. The computing system of claim 1, wherein extracting the key-reference feature having a granularity of a plurality of granularities comprises down-sampling the decoded key frame and the plurality of inter frames. [(Chen section 2.1, first para )]
5. The computing system of claim 4, wherein extracting the key-reference feature having a granularity of a plurality of granularities further comprises transforming the decoded key frame and the plurality of inter frames to a high-dimensional face feature map [(Chen Equation 1, fU-Net. )]
Regarding Claims 8-11: These describes correspond encoding operations that are obvious based on analyses of claims 1-2, 4-5
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Shahan Rahaman whose telephone number is (571)270-1438. The examiner can normally be reached on 7am - 3:30pm.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Nasser Goodarzi can be reached at telephone number (571) 272-4195. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is (571) 273-8300.
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/SHAHAN UR RAHAMAN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2426
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