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 § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-22 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 1 recites, “repeating for one or more of the polarity of down-sampled pixels”. Repeating what? It is unclear what is repeated. The metes bounds and scope of the claim are not defined and the claim is indefinite.
Claims 2-11 depend from claim 1.
As to claim 12 refer to claim 1 rejection.
Claims 13-22 depend from claim 12.
Claim 1 recites a functional outcome “determining that hazard lights are present in the down-sampled pixel based on the frequency domain representation” and, does not define any particular analysis steps of how the “hazard lights” are determined to be present in the down-sampled pixel based on the frequency domain representation . Thus, the scope of the claim encompasses every analysis step known now and would be known in the future for implementing the function of “determining that hazard lights are present in the down-sampled pixel based on the frequency domain representation” and therefore, the metes, bounds and scope of protection are not defined and the claim is indefinite. Although a claim should be interpreted in light of the specification disclosure, it is generally considered improper to read limitations contained in the specification into the claims. See In re Prater, 415 F.2d 1393, 162 USPQ 541 (CCPA 1969) and In re Winkhaus, 527 F.2d 637, 188 USPQ 129 (CCPA 1975), which discuss the premise that one cannot rely on the specification to impart limitations to the claim that are not recited in the claim and therefore, the claim is indefinite (MPEP 2173.05 (g)).
Claims 2-11 depend from claim 1.
As to claim 12 refer to claim 1 rejection.
Claims 13-22 depend from claim 12.
Claim 11 recites “unifying the hazard lights event with other event sources and context such as in-car hazard light information, traffic metrics, weather, geography, and accident risk to prioritise the event”. Regarding claim 11, the phrase "such as" renders the claim indefinite because it is unclear whether the limitations following the phrase are part of the claimed invention. See MPEP § 2173.05(d).
As to claim 22 refer to claim 11 rejection.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 4 and 15 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
The claim 4 step of:
“determining that the filtered signal and the filtered signal of a neighbour down-sampled pixel originate from a single source if the phase of the filtered signal equals the phase of the filtered signal of a neighbour down-sampled pixel and that the filtered signal and the filtered signal of a neighbour down-sampled pixel originate from two sources.”
lacks a corresponding disclosure sufficient for definiteness under 35 USC 112b, as well as evidence of a disclosed “species” of the claimed genus sufficient for support under 35 USC 112a. The specification refers to paragraph [0046] (e.g., of PG Publication US 20260073659 ) as performing this step. However paragraph [0046] recites “For example, if two neighboring down-sampled pixels are found to include hazard lights, the phase of the filtered frequency domain representation of the two signals may be compared. It may be assumed that the two down-sampled pixel include hazard lights that originate from a single source, e.g., illuminated by or originate from the same vehicle, if both the phase of the filtered signal of the down-sampled pixel and the phase of the filtered signal of the neighbor down-sampled pixel are aligned or synchronous, and that the two down-sampled pixels include hazard lights that originate from different sources, e.g., from two vehicles, if the phase of the filtered signal of the down-sampled pixel and the phase of the filtered signal of the neighbor down-sampled pixel are not aligned or synchronous. For example, alignment may be estimated or measured by comparing the phase signals or peaks of each of the phase signals”. Therefore, claim 4 is indefinite under 35 USC 112b, as well as lacks sufficiency of a supporting disclosure under 35 USC 112a, written description.
As to claim 15 refer to claim 4 rejection.
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.
(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.
Claim(s) 1-3, 8, 12-14, 19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by LI YUN et al. (WO 2022073596 A1).
As to claim 1 (as best understood by the Examiner), Li discloses a method for detecting hazard lights of vehicles in a video stream, the method comprising:
spatially downsampling a plurality of sequential frames from the video stream to obtain a plurality of down-sampled pixels in each of the frames [As described above, in the analysis of a video stream, buffered video frames are entropy decoded, and the luminance intensity is estimated for each frame.. For previous GOP, only the estimated intensity maps are needed. In order to reduce the memory consumption further, the estimated intensity maps may also be down-sampled (by definition video frames are consecutive frames and down sampling a video frame generates a plurality of down-sampled pixels of the frame) (page 9, lines 26-34).] and
repeating for one or more of the plurality of down-sampled pixels:
generating a time series for the down-sampled pixel by ordering values of the down- sampled pixel from the plurality of sequential frames over time [ the down sampled pixels are time series, because they are down-sampled of video frames and video frames are time series];
converting the time series into the frequency domain to obtain a frequency domain representation of the time series [the filtering (of video frames) may be conducted in the frequency domain for repetitive patterns, for which, the video frames are transformed, e.g., by using Fourier transform, and certain frequencies with high energy are removed (page 11, lines 11-14).; and
determining that hazard lights are present in the down-sampled pixel based on the frequency domain representation [According some embodiments herein, the completely decoded video frames may be transformed e.g., by using Fourier transform, or by Wavelets, a classifier may be trained to recognize the repetitive patterns (hazard light) from the frequency domain. According some embodiments herein, the repetitive patterns may be identified through autocorrelation within one video frame and cross-correlation between video frames, which are completely decoded. Both autocorrelation and cross-correlation may be performed either from frequency domain or from pixel domain (page 6, lines 15-21).
Claim 12 is a system analogous to method claim 1, arguments analogous to those applied to claim 1 are applicable to claim 12. Li further discloses a memory and processor [The electronic device 500 may comprise other units, where a memory 520, a processor 530 are shown (page 12, lines 27-28 and Fig. 5).
As to claim 2 LI further discloses, wherein determining that the hazard lights are present in the down- sampled pixel comprises applying a band pass filter to the frequency domain representation to obtain a filtered signal [In another embodiment, the filtering may be conducted in the frequency domain for repetitive patterns, for which, the video frames are transformed, e.g., by using Fourier transform, and certain frequencies with high energy are removed (band pass filter)(page 11, lines 11-13).
As to claim 13 refer to claim 2 rejection.
As to claim 3, LI further discloses, wherein determining that the hazard lights are present in the down- sampled pixel comprises:
detecting peaks in an amplitude of the filtered signal; and detecting the hazard lights if a detected peak satisfies a threshold [A Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is applied on this sequence. Because the transform coefficients (peak amplitude) indicate the contributions of each frequency band in the brightness signal, if the coefficients of some frequency bands are greater than a threshold, it is assumed that the brightness change for the video frames is significant and flash patterns are detected (page 6, lines 8-11).
As to claim 14 refer to claim 3 rejection.
As to claim 8, LI further discloses, comprising: presenting the location of the detected hazard lights to a user [According to some embodiments herein, the image processing system 100 may send an indication to the user to indicate that disturbing phenomenon is detected to enable the user (page 10, lines 25-27).
As to claim 19 refer to claim 8 rejection.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 4, and 15 would be allowable if amended to overcome the above rejections and rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to SAMIR ANWAR AHMED whose telephone number is (571)272-7413. The examiner can normally be reached flex.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Edward Urban can be reached at (571)272-7899. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/SAMIR A AHMED/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2665
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