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 .
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 therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
35 U.S.C. 101 requires that a claimed invention must fall within one of the four eligible categories of invention (i.e. process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter) and must not be directed to subject matter encompassing a judicially recognized exception as interpreted by the courts. MPEP 2106. The four eligible categories of invention include: (1) process which is an act, or a series of acts or steps, (2) machine which is an concrete thing, consisting of parts, or of certain devices and combination of devices, (3) manufacture which is an article produced from raw or prepared materials by giving to these materials new forms, qualities, properties, or combinations, whether by hand labor or by machinery, and (4) composition of matter which is all compositions of two or more substances and all composite articles, whether they be the results of chemical union, or of mechanical mixture, or whether they be gases, fluids, powders or solids. MPEP 2106(I).
Claim 23 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 as not falling within one of the four statutory categories of invention because the broadest reasonable interpretation of the instant claims in light of the specification encompasses software which is transitory signals per se. Transitory signals are not within one of the four statutory categories (i.e. process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter). See MPEP 2106(I).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 15-22 and 24-28 are allowed.
The following is an Examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
The present invention is directed to checking and verifying the correct stripping process in particular sections of a conducting wire wherein the method includes extracting features of captured images to verify a correct dimension and/ or positions of residues of dielectric material. The independent claims recite the uniquely distinct features “tagging the advancing conducting wire having been stripped off stripped sections, said tagging comprising acquiring information related to a position and/or a time at a predefined sampling rate; acquiring images of said conducting wire by at least one video camera arranged proximal to and facing at least one face of said conducting wire; - associating the images acquired by said at least one video camera with a respective tagging information acquired for a same point on said conducting wire; extracting features from the images acquired by said at least one video camera and comparing them with respective reference features to verify a correct linear dimension and/or relative position and/or absence of residues of dielectric material on a surface of each stripped section along the conducting wire” and/or “at least one encoder configured to detect an instantaneous position of the advancement of said conducting wire, with consequent temporal and/or positional tagging of said position, said at least one encoder being configured to generate a signal output of each performed tagging, - at least one video camera configured to be arranged downstream of said first station and upstream of said second station, said at least one video camera being configured to be aligned with at least one face of said conducting wire and being configured to acquire images of said advancing conducting wire, and - a control and management unit configured for synchronization of a frequency of the images acquired by said at least one video camera with the signal output from said encoder, for a positional and/or temporal tagging of each image and a consequent unique association thereof with a corresponding region of said conducting wire, and for a feature extraction of the acquired images and a comparison thereof with reference features.” The closest prior arts Tillotson et al. (US Pat. No. 11, 933, 736); KIHARA (US PG PUB 20120304461); YANG et al. (US G PUB 2017/0153372); and Ray et al. (US Pat. No. 9, 612, 210) either singularly or in combination fail to anticipate or render the above highlighted limitations obvious as explicitly recited in the claims in the specific sequence.
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Conclusion
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/HELEN SHIBRU/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2484 February 4, 2026