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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 10/16/2025 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 02/04/2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Specification
The lengthy specification has not been checked to the extent necessary to determine the presence of all possible minor errors. Applicant’s cooperation is requested in correcting any errors of which applicant may become aware in the specification.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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.
Claims 1-4, 12-16, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Xin Zhao et al.: published on “Unified Secondary Transform for Intra Coding Beyond Av1”, 2020 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON IMAGE PROCESSING (ICIP), IEEE, 25 October 2020 (2020-10-25), pages 3393-3397, XP033869355, hereinafter “Zhao”.
Regarding claim 1. Zhao disclose a device for decoding video data, the device comprising:
a memory configured to store the video data (implicit); and
one or more processors implemented in circuitry (implicit), the one or more processors configured to:
apply one or more transforms to a transform block to reconstruct a residual block, wherein the one or more processors are configured to (page 3394, 2. SECONDARY TRANSFORM, 2nd sentence; “In a following up proposal [12], an extended NSST scheme using 64x64 kernels is proposed and the 64x64 kernels are applied on the lower 8x8 frequency region for transform coefficient blocks greater than 8x8. Larger non-separable transform bases are capable to capture correlations among coefficients with longer distances in frequency domain and additional coding gains have been verified in [12]. However, the associated computation cost and memory cost is also largely increased. For example, by using NSST with 64x64 kernel, the additional computation complexity becomes 64 multiplications per sample.”), as at least part of applying the one or more transforms:
determine, based on a prediction type associated with the transform block, a non-separable transform kernel set (page 3395, Section 2 2nd paragraph, Table 2; In Table 2, the numbers in first row indicates the nominal mode index ranging from Oto 7, and S, SH and SV represent SMOOTH, SMOOTH_H and SMOOTH_V modes, respectively. For directional modes, the secondary transform set is selected based on the associated nominal mode index, which means 7 directional modes use one transform set. For SMOOTH, SMOOTH_H and SMOOTH_V modes, separate transform sets are applied), wherein the non- separable transform kernel set is a non-separable primary transform (NSPT) kernel set or a low-frequency non-separable transform (LFNST) kernel set (Abstract; To capture the directionality of residual samples with relatively lower complexity, in this paper, a non-separable unified secondary transform scheme, which is customized for AV1 intra coding scheme, is proposed);
select a kernel from the non-separable transform kernel set (implicit); and
apply a non-separable transform to the transform block using the kernel (implicit); and
reconstruct a block of the video data based on the residual block and a prediction block (implicit).
Regarding claim 2. Zhao disclose the device of claim 1, wherein the prediction type associated with the transform block is one of: directional intra prediction, template-based intra mode derivation with fusion, decoder-side intra mode derivation (DIMD), spatial geometric partitioning mode (SGPM), extrapolation filter-based intra prediction (EIP), matrix-based intra prediction (MIP), intra template matching prediction (ITMP), intra block copy (IBC), non-affine inter prediction, or affine inter prediction (page 3395, Table 2; ‘secondary transform set selection for modes SH, sv;’).
Regarding claim 3. Zhao disclose the device of claim 1, wherein:
for a single fixed set of transform block dimensions, the memory is configured to store a plurality of separate non-separable kernel sets for a plurality of different combinations of prediction types and intra prediction modes (page 3395; Section 3.2; ‘it is proposed to use only one kernel size which is applied for the larger block sizes. For small block sizes such as 4xN and Nx4, they are considered as part of 8xN and Nx8 blocks, and only the overlapping part with larger size kernels (e.g., 64x64) are calculated and used. For a forward secondary transform, when a larger size kernel is applied for a 4xN or Nx4 block, only the overlapping part with the basis are used for secondary transform.-effectively, the kernel set is based on the transform block having specific fixed transform block dimensions’); and
the one or more processors are configured to, as at least part of determining the non-separable transform kernel set, determine the non-separable transform kernel set based on the prediction type associated with the transform block and an intra prediction mode associated with the transform block (page 3395; Section 3.2; ‘see above’).
Regarding claim 4. Zhao disclose the device of claim 1, wherein the one or more processors are configured to, as part of determining the non-separable transform kernel set, determine the non-separable transform kernel set based on the transform block having specific fixed transform block dimensions and having a specific combination of a prediction type and an intra prediction mode (page 3395; Section 3.2; ‘see above’).
Regarding claim 12. Claim 12 has similar limitations as to those treated in the above rejections, and are met by the references as discussed above, and has been rejected for the same reasons of anticipations as used in the rejection to discussed above.
Regarding claims 13-16. Method claims 13-16 are drawn to the method of using the corresponding device claimed in claims 1-4. Therefore method claims 13-16 correspond to device claims 1-4 are rejected for same reasons of anticipation as used above.
Regarding claim 20. Non-transitory computer-readable storage medium claim 20 is drawn to the non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of using the corresponding to the device of using the same as claimed in claim 1. Therefore, non-transitory computer-readable storage medium claim 20 corresponds to the device claim 1, and is rejected for the same reasons of anticipation as used above.
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 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 5-6, and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Zhao as applied to claims 1 and 13 above, and in view of Muhammed Coban et al. published as “Algorithm description of Enhanced Compression Model 12 (ECM 12)”, 33. JVET MEETING; 20240117 - 20240126; TELECONFERENCE; (THE JOINT VIDEO EXPLORATION TEAM OF ISO/IEC JTC1/ SC29/WG11 AND ITU-T SG.16 ), no. JVET-AG2025; m66954 29 March 2024 (2024-03-29), hereinafter “Coban”
Regarding claim 5. Zhao disclose the device of claim 1, but failed to disclose wherein the one or more processors are configured to, as at least part of determining the non-separable transform kernel set, determine the non-separable transform kernel set from a primary kernel set and a secondary kernel set, wherein the primary kernel set is defined for all block shapes in a predefined set of block shapes, and wherein the secondary kernel set is defined for one or more specific block shapes and prediction types.
Coban, however, in the same field of endeavor, shows wherein the one or more processors are configured to, as at least part of determining the non-separable transform kernel set, determine the non-separable transform kernel set from a primary kernel set and a secondary kernel set, wherein the primary kernel set is defined for all block shapes in a predefined set of block shapes, and wherein the secondary kernel set is defined for one or more specific block shapes and prediction types (page 70 – Figure 56 and Table 9; ‘To derive the 2nd candidate: For TIMD, if fusion is applied, the 2nd TIMD IPM is first considered; For SGPM, the 2 IPMs that SGPM uses are first considered; For MIP and EIP, PLANAR is first considered’).
It would have been obvious to the person of having ordinary skilled in the art before the effective filling date of the invention to combine the teachings of Coban in to Zhao in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of video encoding and decoding as well as to yield predictive result.
Regarding claim 6. Coban further shows the device of claim 5, wherein the secondary kernel set is defined only for a non-separable primary transform (page 72; “3.3.8 LFNST/NSPT for inter coding: For inter coded block, an intra prediction mode is first derived according to the inter prediction block with a DIMD-like process applied to the prediction. Then the derived intra prediction mode is used to select an LFNST/NSPT transform set and the transform is processed with the selected LFNST/NSPT kernel, like in the intra coding process.”).
Regarding claim 17. Method claim 17 is drawn to the method of using the corresponding device claimed in claim 5. Therefore method claim 17 corresponds to device claim 5 is rejected for same reasons of obviousness as used above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 7-11, 18-19 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.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ASMAMAW G TARKO whose telephone number is (571)272-7493. The examiner can normally be reached M-F: 8am-5pm EST.
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/ASMAMAW G TARKO/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2482
