Ex Parte Ameres et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardNov 8, 201713599360 (P.T.A.B. Nov. 8, 2017) Copy Citation United States Patent and Trademark Office 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 APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 13/599,360 08/30/2012 Eric Ameres GOGL-109-F 5012 97818 Google LLC c/o Young Basi 3001 West Big 7590 11/13/2017 EXAMINER le Hanlon & MacFarlane, P.C. Beaver Rd., Ste. 624 ANDERSON II, JAMES M Troy, MI 48084-3107 ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2486 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 11/13/2017 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): docketing @ youngbasile. com audit @ youngbasile. com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte ERIC AMERES, JAMES BANKOSKI, SCOTT LAVARNWAY, YAOWU XU, DAN MILLER, ADRIAN GRANGE, and PAUL WILKINS Appeal 2017-006450 Application 13/599,360 Technology Center 2486 Before ERIC S. FRAHM, JOHNNY A. KUMAR, and NORMAN H. BEAMER, Administrative Patent Judges. KUMAR, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from a Final Rejection of claims 1, 2, 4—11, 13—16, and 21—25. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm. Exemplary Claim Exemplary claim 10 under appeal reads as follows (bracketed matter and some paragraphing added): 10. A method for encoding a video signal having a plurality of frames including a current frame, comprising: [a] generating an alternate reference frame, wherein the alternate reference frame occurs prior to the current frame in the Appeal 2017-006450 Application 13/599,360 video signal and wherein the alternate reference frame is other than a frame immediately prior to the current frame; [b] receiving, after generating the alternate reference frame, a report of an error associated with decoding the current frame; [c] generating a recovery frame in response to the received report; and [d] encoding the recovery frame using the alternate reference frame. Rejections on Appeal1 Claims 1, 4—6, 8—10, 13—16, and 23—25 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Cosman (US 2006/0098738 Al; publ. May 11, 2006) (based on the provisional Application 60/438,894, filed Jan. 9, 2003) in view of Thomas Wiegand et al. (Long-TermMemory Motion-Compensated Prediction for Robust Video Transmission, IEEE, 152-55 (2000)). Claims 2, 11,21, and 22 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Cosman, in view of Wiegand, in further view of Nagai et al. (US 2002/0053053 Al; publ. May 2, 2002). Claim 7 is rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Cosman, in view of Wiegand, in further view of Proctor et al. (US 5,926,226; iss. July 20, 1999). 1 We select claims 1 and 10 as representative. Separate patentability is not argued for claims 2, 4—9, 11, 13—16, and 21—25. Except for our ultimate decision, the § 103(a) rejections of claims 2, 4—9, 11, 13—16, and 21—25 are not discussed further herein. 2 Appeal 2017-006450 Application 13/599,360 Appellants ’ Contentions 1. Appellants contend that the Examiner erred in rejecting claim 10 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) because, inter alia: neither Cosman, nor Wiegand, taken alone, or in combination, teaches, suggests, or implies encoding the feedback frame. Furthermore, one skilled in the art would not encode the feedback frame described in the combination of Cosman and Wiegand. The purpose of the feedback frame in the combination of Cosman and Wiegand is so that the encoder has a reference frame that is the same as the reference frame at the decoder. (See e.g., Cosman | [0076], see also [Wiegand] § 4.2, NACK mode). The combination of Cosman and Wiegand indicates that error concealment is performed in the feedback frame to overcome the “temporal error propagation which causes deviating reference frames at encoder and decoder” when error concealment is performed at the decoder. ([Wiegand] § 1; See also Cosman | [0033]). Thus, encoding the error concealed feedback frame would be redundant as the decoder already has the identical frame. Reply Br. 32 (Panel’s emphasis added). 2. Appellants also contend that the Examiner erred in rejecting claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) because: the Examiner’s Answer relies upon interpreting both “recovery frame” and “alternate reference frame,” as recited by Claim 1, as being equivalent to the “long-term past frame” described in the combination of Cosman and Wiegand. The Appellants] respectfully submit[] that such an interpretation is inconsistent with well-established cannons of claim construction and is unreasonable in view of the recited claims and the cited art. For example, receiving the long-term past frame after generating the long-term past frame[], and then decoding0 the long-term past frame using itself,0 would be entirely redundant because, as 2 We note that the pages of the Reply Brief are not numbered. We have numbered them accordingly. 3 Appeal 2017-006450 Application 13/599,360 indicated by the Examiner’s Answer, the long-term past frame is known to be error free. Reply Br. 4—5 (Panel’s emphasis added). Issue on Appeal Did the Examiner err in rejecting claims 1, 2, 4—11, 13—16, and 21—25 as being obvious because the references fail to teach or suggest the claim limitations at issue? ANALYSIS We have reviewed the Examiner’s rejections in light of Appellants’ arguments that the Examiner has erred. We disagree with Appellants’ conclusions. Except as noted herein, we adopt as our own: (1) the findings and reasons set forth by the Examiner in the Final Office Action from which the appeal is taken (Final Act. 2—11); and (2) the reasons set forth by the Examiner in the Examiner’s Answer (Ans. 11—12) in response to the Appellants’ Appeal Brief. We concur with the conclusions reached by the Examiner. We highlight the following. The Examiner finds, and we agree, Cosman teaches claimed elements 10 [a] and 10[b] above, whereas the claimed elements 10[c] and 10[d] are taught by Wiegand. Final Act. 6—7. As to Appellants’ above contentions 1 and 2, we are not persuaded the Examiner erred. We are not persuaded because essentially Appellants’ argument is premised on a “physical” or “bodily” incorporation of limitations of one reference into the other. This is not the standard of obviousness. See In re Sneed, 710 F.2d 1544, 1550 (Fed. Cir. 1983) (“[I]t is not necessary that the inventions of the references be physically combinable to render obvious the invention under review”) (citations omitted); In re 4 Appeal 2017-006450 Application 13/599,360 Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425 (CCPA 1981) (“The test for obviousness is not whether the features of a secondary reference may be bodily incorporated into the structure of the primary reference .... Rather, the test is what the combined teachings of the references would have suggested to those of ordinary skill in the art”). Moreover, “[a] reference must be considered for everything it teaches by way of technology and is not limited to the particular invention it is describing and attempting to protect.” EWP Corp. v. Reliance Universal Inc., 755 F.2d 898, 907 (Fed. Cir. 1985) (emphasis omitted). Furthermore, an ordinarily skilled artisan is not compelled to blindly follow the teaching of one prior art reference over the other without the exercise of independent judgment. See Lear Siegler, Inc. v. Aeroquip Corp., 733 F.2d 881, 889 (Fed. Cir. 1984). “[T]he analysis need not seek out precise teachings directed to the specific subject matter of the challenged claim, for a court can take account of the inferences and creative steps that a person of ordinary skill in the art would employ.” KSR Int 7 Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398,418 (2007). The Examiner has set forth why an ordinary skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine the teachings of Cosman and Wiegand to arrive at the claimed invention. Final Act. 7. In particular, the Examiner finds, and we agree: it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to combine Cosman and Wiegand in order to increase the robustness of the video codec. It is further noted that Wiegand fails to disclose using the alternate reference frame to encode the feedback frame. However, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to use the alternate reference frame to encode the feedback frame. The motivation for this modification 5 Appeal 2017-006450 Application 13/599,360 is the fact that the encoder may not know if the previous frame was received without error, however, when using feedback the encoder knows a long-term frame was received without error. Therefore it would be advantageous to use the frame that was received without error to encode the recovery frame because the blocks are known to be correctly held by the decoder. Final Act. 7. Appellants have not presented any persuasive evidence or argument why the ordinary artisan would not have possessed the knowledge and skills to know how to combine the prior art references. As such, we find that one of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized how to adjust Cosman to accommodate the teachings from Wiegand. DECISION We affirm the Examiner’s rejections of claims 1, 2, 4—11, 13—16, and 21—25 as being unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(l)(iv). AFFIRMED 6 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation