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 .
DETAILED ACTION
Summary
Restriction/ Election Response
The examiner agrees the claims following the Preliminary Amendment dated April 14th, 2025 should be subjective to the last restriction office action instead of the Claims dated April 14th, 2025. The examiner made this error by just examining the Claims file by not knowing there is the Preliminary Amendment file filed separately on the same date. However, there is not much difference between the restriction on the Claims file and the Preliminary Amendment file in which more claims were cancelled. The examiner disagrees the claims 6-9, 11, 19-22, 24, 26 are drawn to the elected species and should be substantively examined following entry of this response to the restriction requirement. As indicated in the Preliminary Amendment, the claims 6-9, 11, 19-22 and 24 depends on the independent claims 1 and 14 which belongs to the species I and not elected by the applicant for examining. Because of this reason, the claims 27, 30 corresponding to the species II are only examined by the examiner.
This office action for US Patent application 19/177912 is responsive to communications filed on June 2nd, 2026. Currently, claims 1-44 are pending are presented for examination while claims 27 and 30 are elected for examining and the rest of other claims are supposed to be canceled.
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)(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.
Claims 27, 30 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C §102 (a)(2) as being anticipated by KLOPP et al. (US 20250124607 A1: refer to its PCT filed January 12th, 2023).
Regarding claim 27, KLOPP et al. (US 20250124607 A1: refer to its PCT filed January 12th, 2023) meets the claim limitations, as follows:
An apparatus comprising:
at least one processor; and
at least one memory storing instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the apparatus [i.e. Figs. 1] at least to:
produce content of a region of data using a neural network, wherein the data comprises at least one or more of: an image or video [i.e. apply a NN with different parameter sets to different portions of a video frame; Fig. 5];
store information about the neural network using a neural network parameter tree [i.e. transmit various syntax elements to the decoder in which the syntax elements contain the parameter sets of the neural network; paragraph. 0044-0045];
encode the information about the neural network into or along a bitstream [i.e. the neural network can be a DNN, CNN, RNN, etc. and syntax elements store and indicate information of the neural network; paragraph. 0021, 0044, 0055, 0066-0067]; and
encode the neural network parameter tree into or along the bitstream [i.e. the parameters of the neural network are transmitted in the bitstream to the decoder; paragraph. 0032, Fig. 6].
Regarding claim 30, all the claim limitations which are set forth and rejected as per discussion for claim 27.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications form the examiner should be directed to Nam Pham, whose can be contacted by phone at (571)270-7352. The examiner can normally be reached on Mon—Thurs.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, CZEKAJ DAVID, can be reached on (571)272-7327.
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/NAM D PHAM/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2487