Ex Parte Han

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Jun 20, 2016

10964917 (P.T.A.B. Jun. 20, 2016)

UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE
10/964,917 10/15/2004
23373 7590 06/22/2016
SUGHRUE MION, PLLC
2100 PENNSYLVANIA A VENUE, N.W.
SUITE 800
WASHINGTON, DC 20037
FIRST NAMED INVENTOR
Woo-jinHan
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www .uspto.gov
ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
Q78758 5524
EXAMINER
AN,SHAWNS
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2483
NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE
06/22/2016 ELECTRONIC
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the
following e-mail address( es):
PPROCESSING@SUGHRUE.COM
sughrue@sughrue.com
USPTO@sughrue.com
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
Ex parte WOO-JIN HAN
Appeal2014-007130
Application 10/964,917
Technology Center 2400
Before CARL W. WHITEHEAD JR., DANIEL N. FISHMAN, and
NABEEL U. KHAN, Administrative Patent Judges.
KHAN, Administrative Patent Judge.
DECISION ON APPEAL
Appellant1 appeals under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Final Rejection
of claims 68, 70, 71, and 74. Claims 1---67 and 73 are withdrawn. Final Act.
1. We have jurisdiction over the appealed claims under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b ).
We affirm.
1 According to Appellant, the real party in interest is Samsung Electronics
Co., Ltd. App. Br. 2.
Appeal2014-007130
Application 10/964,917
THE INVENTION
Appellant's invention relates generally to video compression, and
more particularly, to video coding having temporal scalability through
motion compensated temporal filtering according to a constrained temporal
level sequence. Spec. i-f 2.
Exemplary independent claim 68 is reproduced below with relevant
limitations emphasized.
68. A video decoding method performed by a decoding device
to restore a current frame whose redundancy among a plurality
of frames each having temporal level values is eliminated and
then encoded, the method comprising:
selecting, by the decoding device, as reference frames at
least a first reference frame and a second reference frame; and
restoring the current frame from the reference frames
which are selected;
wherein, the first reference frame and the second reference
frame have indices which are lower or higher than an index of
the current frame; and
wherein a temporal level of the first reference frame is
different than a temporal level of the second reference frame, and
the temporal level of the first reference frame and the temporal
level of the second reference frame are higher than a temporal
level of the current frame;
wherein, if the current frame is in a highest temporal level,
the current frame is restored without referring to any reference
frames.
REFERENCES and REJECTION
Claims 68, 70, 71, and 74 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as
unpatentable over Chaddha (US 6,392,705 Bl, May 21, 2002) and
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Application 10/964,917
Appellant's Admitted Prior Art (US 2005/0117647 Al, June 2, 2005)
("AAP A").
ANALYSIS
A. Claim 68
Appellant argues "that Chaddha in view of AAP A does not disclose or
suggest that 'if the current frame is in a highest temporal level, the current
frame is restored without referring to any reference frames,' in combination
with other elements of the claim." App. Br. 10-11. In particular, Appellant
argues "the L frame of temporal level 3 in FIG. IA cannot be restored
without referring to a reference frame." App. Br. 11. According to
Appellant "during decoding, the L frame of temporal level 3, being a frame
corresponding to an average between an original frame and a reference
frame, would still need to be decoded with reference to another frame, i.e., a
reference frame." App. Br. 12.
We are unpersuaded by Appellant's arguments because they are not
commensurate with the scope of claim 68. During examination, claims are
given their broadest reasonable interpretation consistent with the
specification. See In re Am. Acad. of Sci. Tech Ctr., 367 F.3d 1359, 1364
(Fed. Cir. 2004). "Construing claims broadly during prosecution is not unfair
to the applicant ... because the applicant has the opportunity to amend the
claims to obtain more precise claim coverage." Id. Here, claim 68 is
directed to a video decoding method including the disputed step of "wherein,
if the current frame is in a highest temporal level, the current frame is
restored without referring to any reference frames." Claim 68 's step of
restoring the current frame without referring to any reference frames will be
performed, if at all, "if the current frame is in a highest temporal level."
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Thus, in the event the current frame is not in a highest temporal level, the
step of restoring the current frame without referring to any reference frames
need not be performed at all. Based on the claim limitation as written, a
broad but reasonable interpretation of claim 68 encompasses an instance in
which the method ends without performing the step of restoring the current
frame without referring to any other reference frame. See Ex parte Katz,
2011 WL 514314, at *4--5 (BPAI Jan. 27, 2011) (the broadest reasonable
interpretation of a conditional step in a method claim includes instances in
which the conditional step would not be invoked), reh 'g denied, 2011 WL
1211248, at *2 (BPAI Mar. 25, 2011).
Appellant has not raised any arguments directed at the Examiner's
findings relating to the "selecting" and "restoring" steps of claim 68 and
only argues the Examiner errs in finding AAPA teaches the disputed step.
We conclude the Examiner did not need to present evidence of the
obviousness of the disputed step under the broadest reasonable interpretation
because the claimed method does not require the disputed step be
performed.2 Appellant's arguments that are directed to the Examiner's
2 Should there be further prosecution of this application, we note Appellant
cites paragraph 124 and Figures 5 and 6 of the Appellant's Specification as
disclosing the disputed limitation of restoring a current frame without
referring to any reference frames. App. Br. 6. According to Appellant,
paragraph 124 and Figures 5 and 6 of the Specification describe a frame at a
highest temporal level being an I frame (intra-coded frame) that refers to no
other frame. Id. We note that Figure 5 of the AAP A is identical to Figure 5
of Appellant's Specification and its associated description also refers to "an I
frame at the highest temporal level." AAP A i-f 0111. The Examiner may
wish to review Figure 5 of the AAP A and associated description to
determine whether it would be sufficient to teach or suggest to one of
ordinary skill in the art, the disputed limitation of independent claim 68.
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findings with respect to the disputed limitation are, therefore, not
commensurate with the scope of the claim under a broad but reasonable
interpretation thereof.
Accordingly, we sustain the Examiner's rejection of independent
claim 68. For the same reasons, we also sustain the Examiner's rejection of
independent claim 70. We also sustain the Examiner's rejection of claim 74,
which depends from claim 68, and for which Appellant does not present any
arguments for separate patentability. See App. Br. 13.
B. Claim 71
Appellant does not present any additional arguments for the
patentability of claim 71 other than those presented for claim 68. We find
these arguments unpersuasive as before, but analyze the claim separately
because it is directed to an apparatus rather than a method.
Claim 71 recites two structural units: ( 1) "a bitstream interpretation
computing unit" and (2) "an inverse-temporal transformation computing
unit." Both of these structural units operate to decode a current frame using
certain reference frames. The "bitstream interpretation computing unit ...
selects ... reference frames" and the "inverse-temporal transformation
computing unit ... restores the current frame from the reference frames
which are selected."
The disputed limitation of claim 71 recites "wherein, if the current
frame is in a highest temporal level, the current frame is restored without
referring to any reference frames." Under the broadest reasonable
interpretation of claim 71, we conclude that this disputed wherein clause
does not limit the structure of the claimed apparatus because it is not
directed to reference frames. In other words, the disputed wherein clause
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conditionally performs the step of restoring the current frame and does so
without referring to any reference frames. Thus, it does not further limit
either the bitstream interpretation computing unit or the inverse-temporal
transformation computing unit, both of which perform functions related to
reference frames. The disputed limitation is, therefore, accorded no weight.
See MPEP § 2111.04.
Because Appellant does not dispute the Examiner's findings regarding
either the bitstream interpretation computing unit or the inverse-temporal
transformation computing unit and the disputed wherein clause does not
limit the scope of the claim, we sustain the Examiner's rejection of claim 71.
DECISION
The Examiner's rejection of claims 68, 70, 71, and 74 is affirmed.
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended. See 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(l )(iv).
AFFIRMED
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