Siemens AG is an engineering and manufacturing company. The Company focuses on areas of electrification, automation, and digitalization. Siemens similarly offers engineering solutions in automation and control, power, conveyance, and medical analysis.
In India, the business of Siemens AG focuses on system and methods for integrated and predictive analysis of molecular, imaging, and clinical data for patient-specific management of diseases, apparatus, and method for evaluating an activity distribution, and irradiation system, Method, system, and apparatus for processing rights and Network Node for a Communication Network.
Siemens AG filed a patent application numbered 4378/DELNP/2013 that is titled COMPRESSION AND DECOMPRESSION OF REFERENCE IMAGES IN A VIDEO ENCODER. The patent has been filed in the field of Electronics. This Patent Application has been granted as Patent Number 351395. This invention covers a method for transforming a reconstructed frame-block (RBM), providing the reconstructed frame block by decoding a coded frame-block, transforming the reconstructed frame block with a Compression Filter (CF) to increase a compression rate of a frame compression unit (PC), characterized in that the filter transforms the reconstructed frame-block (RBM).
During the patent examination, the patent examiner raised objections under Section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970. It was pointed out that the claims should specify, that apparatus or unit executing the method such as “transforming first frame data” etc., are hardware or software tools. Method claims as such are a mere statements and appear to be an algorithm or software tool, hence not allowable. Further, the claimed method appears to be implemented/ executed in the apparatus by generic hardware i.e. processor and/or memory thereby lacking constructional features, which cannot be allowed.
As a response the Applicant submitted that the objection raised by Learned Controller as the invention relates to a method and device for compressing a sequence of frames, comprising a reference frame buffer SRB. Frames are encoded, using predictive coding, also known as inter-frame coding. The novel constructional feature of compression filter (CF) is provided for transformation i.e. filtering.
Advocate Rahul Dev is a Patent Attorney & International Business Lawyer practicing Technology, Intellectual Property & Corporate Laws. He is reachable at rd (at) patentbusinesslawyer (dot) com & @rdpatentlawyer on Twitter.
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