Halloween will be commemorated by a review of a creepy patent. U.S. Patent No. 10,313,638 B1 (‘638) issued on June 4, 2019, for “Image Creation Using Geo-Fence Data.” The inventors are Kalidas Yeturu of Chennai, India, and Howard Lee Huddleston, Jr., of Seattle, Washington. The applicant/assignee is Amazon Technologies, Inc., the e-commerce giant.
Figure 1 illustrates the claimed invention:
As shown in the figure, the invention is a drone, which will conduct surveillance of a private home, providing digital clips of the surveillance which are stored and relayed back to central controller. In other words, the ‘638 patent was issued to conduct spying operations on you or your neighbors without you knowing. The ‘638 specification describes the problem in the art, namely:
Traditional home surveillance may include video cameras installed by a service provider to monitor a property. The viewpoint of these video cameras may be fixed or may have limited movable range an therefore the video cameras may miss important events.
So, Amazon’s new ‘638 patent will, ideally, capture these “important events” through its drone technology. The claims are directed to the method and system of drone surveillance with geo-fence, as well as the computer-readable medium storing the surveillance data and instructions. Further limitations include for the drone’s LIDAR/RADAR data and GPS coordinates.
The Cooperate Patent Classifications are H04N, pictorial communication, e.g., television, namely closed circuit television systems, i.e., systems in which the signal is not broadcast from a mobile camera, e.g., for remote control (7/185); G06K, recognition of data, presentation of data, record carriers, and handling record carriers, namely, aligning or centering of image pick-up or image-field through determination of region of interest (9/3233), and segmentation of touching or overlapping patterns in the image field (segmentation by quantization, e.g., thresholding, by cutting or merging image elements, e.g., region growing, watershed, clustering-based techniques) (9/342); and G06T, image data processing or generation, namely, image analysis (7/0097), and analysis of geometric attributes (7/602).
There is no data to indicate that Amazon has a project or program dedicated to this new technology at this time.
Boo! Enjoy your Halloween, IP world!