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 § 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)(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.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Zhang et al. US11431964B2, “Zhang”
Claim 1 recites a conversion between a current video block of a video and a bitstream of the video is the same as a bit stream generated by a conversion, the method comprising… is a product by process claim limitation where the product is the bit stream and the process is the method steps to generate the bitstream. MPEP §2113 recites “Product-by-Process claims are not limited to the manipulations of the recited steps, only the structure implied by the steps”. Thus, the scope of the claim is the storage medium storing the bitstream (with the structure implied by the method steps). The structure includes the information and samples manipulated by the steps.
Claim 18-20 recited storage medium storing the bitstream. “To be given patentable weight, the printed matter and associated product must be in a functional relationship. A functional relationship can be found where the printed matter performs some function with respect to the product to which it is associated”. MPEP §2111.05(I)(A). When a claimed “computer-readable medium merely serves as a support for information or data, no functional relationship exists. MPEP §2111.05(III). The storage medium storing the claimed bitstream in claim 18 merely services as a support for the storage of the bitstream and provides no fictional relationship between the stored bitstream and storage medium. Therefor the structure bitstream, which scope is implied by the method steps, is non-functional descriptive material and given no patentable weight. MPEP §2111.05(III).
Thus, the claims’ scope is just a storage medium storing data and is anticipated by REFERENCE which recites a storage medium storing a bitstream (Zhang, claim 1).
Claims 2-17 are rejected under the same ground for not resolving the issue.
Allowable Subject Matter
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Yang discloses “Efficient representation and coding of fine-granular motion information is one of the key research areas for exploiting inter-frame correlation in video coding. Representative techniques towards this direction are affine motion compensation (AMC), decoder-side motion vector refinement (DMVR), and subblock-based temporal motion vector prediction (SbTMVP). Fine-granular motion information is derived at subblock level for all the three coding tools. In addition, the obtained inter prediction can be further refined by two optical flow-based coding tools, the bi-directional optical flow (BDOF) for bi-directional inter prediction and the prediction refinement with optical flow (PROF) exclusively used in combination with AMC. The aforementioned five coding tools have been extensively studied and finally adopted in the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. This paper presents technical details of each tool and highlights the design elements with the consideration of typical hardware implementations. Following the common test conditions defined by Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) for the development of VVC, 5.7% bitrate reduction on average is achieved by the five tools. For test sequences characterized by large and complex motion, up to 13.4% bitrate reduction is observed. Additionally, visual quality improvement is demonstrated and analyzed.”
US 11431964 B2 discloses Devices, systems and methods for digital video coding, which include sub-block based inter prediction methods, are described. An exemplary method for video processing includes determining, for a conversion between a current block of video and a bitstream representation of the video, a maximum number of candidates in a sub-block based merge candidate list and/or whether to add sub-block based temporal motion vector prediction (SbTMVP) candidates to the sub-block based merge candidate list based on whether temporal motion vector prediction (TMVP) is enabled for use during the conversion or whether a current picture referencing (CPR) coding mode is used for the conversion, and performing, based on the determining, the conversion.
However, none of the cited prior arts discloses determining, for a conversion between a current video block of a video and a bitstream of the video, a subblock-based temporal block vector prediction (SbTBVP) of the current video block; and performing the conversion based on the SbTBVP.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
US 20240031557 A1 Block Vector Predictor Candidate Selection
US 11876957 B2 Method and apparatus for processing video data
US 11570753 B2 Method and apparatus of flexible data transmissions and receptions in next generation cellular networks
US 20230019459 A1 ORDER-BASED UPDATING FOR INTRA BLOCK COPY IN VIDEO CODING
US 20230007273 A1 ENCODER, A DECODER AND CORRESPONDING METHODS USING INTRA BLOCK COPY (IBC) DEDICATED BUFFER AND DEFAULT VALUE REFRESHING FOR LUMA AND CHROMA COMPONENT
US 20220150540 A1 MAPPING RESTRICTION FOR INTRA-BLOCK COPY VIRTUAL BUFFER
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/FRANK F HUANG/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2485