US 10495450

I'll search for authoritative information on US patent 10495450, including any litigation or CAFC activity.

Let me refine the searches to specifically target this patent number and any litigation activity.

Let me try one more targeted search for any litigation or CAFC activity specifically involving this patent.

Summary of US Patent 10,495,450

Important caveat up front: My live searches (USPTO/PTAB portals, CourtListener, and general web) returned no litigation, PTAB, or CAFC 2026 docket activity for US 10,495,450 specifically. Hits I retrieved involved different patents that superficially resemble the number — e.g., U.S. 10,447,450 (Neo Wireless), 10,509,446 and 11,061,450 (Cooler Master), 10,873,685 / 10,877,266 (Optimum Imaging v. Nikon/Fujifilm/Olympus), and 7,612,805 / 8,451,339 (Optimum Imaging). None of these is this patent. Likewise, the Nikon v. Viltrox dispute covered in 2026 news concerns Chinese Z-mount mechanical patents and does not involve this number. So any CAFC 2026 docket presence should be treated as not established; I am answering from the authoritative full patent text supplied in the prompt.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (verbatim)

An imaging system, including: a first body; a first detector that is provided in the first body and includes a first imager that images an object; a first information calculator that is provided in the first body and uses a detection result of the first detector to calculate at least one of shape information and texture information of the object; a second body that is arranged at a position separate from the first body and has identification information detected by the first imager; a second detector that is provided in the second body and includes a second imager that images the object; and a position acquirer that acquires position information including a positional relation between the first detector and the second detector based on the identification information detected by the first imager.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The fetched text presents the claims as six enumerated "aspects," which in a Google Patents record conventionally track the independent claims. I did not retrieve the verbatim full claim set in the fetch, so the numbering below is my mapping from the aspects — treat it as probable, not confirmed.

1. Aspect 1 — Imaging system (multi-camera pose self-registration). A first camera body has a detector (imager) plus an on-board processor that computes shape and/or texture (a 3D model) of an object from that detection. A second, separate camera body carries identification information that the first camera's imager can see. A position acquirer then derives the relative position between the two detectors from that identification information — i.e., the system figures out its own camera-to-camera geometry optically, without manual survey.

2. Aspect 2 — Imaging system (side-face variant). Same idea, but the second body is placed within the field of view of the first imager and has a side face bearing a detectable specific part; the relative position between the two imagers is derived from that imaged side-face feature. This broadens the invention beyond an explicit "identification code" to any recognizable surface marking/geometry.

3. Aspect 3 — Imaging device (single-body perspective). From the standpoint of just the first device: a first body with a detector and an information calculator, plus a position acquirer that uses the detection of another body's identification information to obtain the positional relationship between the first detector and that other body. In other words, the "master" unit, not the system as a whole.

4. Aspect 4 — Method of imaging. A method reciting the steps: image the object with the first imager; compute shape/texture from the first detector's result; image the object with a second imager in a separate second body; detect the second body's identification information with the first imager; and derive position information for the positional relation between the second detector and the first detector from that detected identification information.

5. Aspect 5 — Storage medium (program, system/device framing). A non-transitory-style program product causing a computer to: image the object with the first detector; compute shape/texture via the first information calculator; and, using the result of the first imager detecting the second body's identification information, acquire position information including the positional relation between the first detector and the second body.

6. Aspect 6 — Storage medium (program, side-face variant). A further program product covering: imaging with the first imager; computing shape/texture; imaging the object with a second imager arranged within the first imager's field of view in a second body having an imageable side face; and acquiring position information for the relative position between the two imagers based on a specific part on that side face.

Technical thrust (how the independent claims hang together)

The common inventive core is automatic, vision-based determination of the geometric relationship between two (or more) cameras that jointly capture an object for 3D reconstruction. One camera "sees" the other (via a code/sticker, an LED pattern, a diffraction-grating identifier, or simply a marked side face), and that sighting supplies the baseline/pose needed to fuse the partial 3D models each camera produces. The specification explains that knowing this relation lets the system integrate the two partial models with reduced or eliminated feature-point matching (FIGS. 2A–2B, 7–8), and it describes enhancements such as a movement detector (accelerometer/gyro) to back out the pose when the second camera was only briefly in view (second embodiment), a database of known camera positions/attitudes (third embodiment, FIG. 14), and on-camera model integration with timestamps (fourth embodiment, FIG. 15).

Confidence / uncertainty

• High confidence: bibliographic fields, abstract, and the six claim aspects — all drawn from the authoritative full text you provided.
• Lower confidence: (a) the exact independent/dependent claim numbers and verbatim claim language — the fetch did not include the full claims listing, so the aspect-to-claim mapping is inferred; (b) any 2026 litigation/CAFC docket status — I found none for this patent, and searches surfaced only unrelated patents with similar numbers, so I cannot confirm any CAFC 2026 activity.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 10495450. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me refine with the formatted patent number and litigation-specific sources.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 10,495,450

Bottom line

No litigation (district court, ITC, or Federal Circuit/CAFC) involving U.S. Patent No. 10,495,450 was identified in the searches performed. I found no complaint, counterclaim, IPR/PGR, ITC Section 337 investigation, or appeal in which 10,495,450 is the patent-in-suit.

I want to be explicit about confidence: this is a negative finding based on the searches I was able to run. I was unable to complete an exhaustive, source-by-source sweep (e.g., direct queries to the Unified Patents litigation portal, PACER, Docket Navigator, and CourtListener for this specific number), so the correct characterization is "none found," not "confirmed none." A definitive clearance check should be run against those databases directly.

What the patent is, for identification discipline

• Patent: U.S. 10,495,450 B2 — "Imaging system, imaging device, method of imaging, and storage medium for imaging an object using at least one detector"
• Application: 15/716,984; filed 2017-09-27; granted 2019-12-03
• Priority: 2015-03-31; continuation of PCT/JP2016/059906 (filed 2016-03-28)
• Assignee: Nikon Corporation
• Inventors: Yoshihiro Nakagawa; Takeaki Sugimura
• Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2036-08-03
• Subject matter: multi-camera 3D shape/texture capture, where a first imager detects identification information on a second imaging device's body to derive the detectors' positional relation

Negative-search notes and why "similar number" hits were excluded

Per the instruction to interpret numbers literally and not auto-correct, I want to flag a likely source of false positives rather than treat them as matches:

• U.S. 10,447,450 (Neo Wireless LLC) appears repeatedly in my results — e.g., Neo Wireless LLC v. FCA US LLC (E.D. Mich., Case No. 2:22-md-03034) and multiple IPRs (IPR2022-01567, IPR2023-00763, IPR2023-00793, IPR2023-00962, IPR2023-00963) brought by Volkswagen, Ford, Honda, GM, Nissan, and Tesla. This is a different patent (wireless communications) and is not a match for 10,495,450.
• Nikon appears as a litigation party in several matters I surfaced — most notably the Carl Zeiss AG & ASML Netherlands B.V. v. Nikon Corp. / Nikon Inc. case (C.D. Cal., Case No. 2:17-cv-07083-RGK-MRW) and the parallel ITC Section 337 investigation 337-TA-1059 (digital cameras, software and components), plus Nikon v. Viltrox (Z-mount patent, China/CNIPA). The asserted patents in those matters are different numbers (e.g., Zeiss/ASML asserted patents such as the '023, '052, '553, '756, '133, '346, '739 family, and the '312/'017/'574/'335/'163 patents in the C.D. Cal. case). None of these identified 10,495,450 as the patent-in-suit. I could not confirm that 10,495,450 was ever asserted in any Nikon matter.

Recommended next steps to close out the search

To convert "none found" into a defensible conclusion, I would query, by exact number (10,495,450 / 10495450 / "the '450 patent" in a Nikon context):

1. Unified Patents litigation portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (search by patent number)
2. PACER / CourtListener RECAP — full-text docket search restricted to the patent number
3. USPTO PTAB — IPR/PGR/CBM proceedings where 10,495,450 is the challenged patent
4. ITC EDIS — Section 337 investigations listing the patent
5. CAFC — any appeal referencing the patent number
6. Docket Navigator / Lex Machina (if available) — patent-level litigation report

Caveats

• Patent numbers were treated literally; no substitution or auto-correction was applied.
• The searches I ran returned substantial noise, and I was cut off before running the targeted database queries above, so treat this as a preliminary negative result.

If you can authorize a direct pull from any of the databases in the list above (or a Docket Navigator/Lex Machina export for the number), I can produce the full case-by-case litigation table with plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, and status/outcome.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM petitions against US 10,495,450, and nothing in my web-search sweep contradicts that — the default ("no PTAB activity") holds. The practical bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB win to borrow and no claim of this patent has been canceled by the Board. You are defending an untested patent — none of its claims have been narrowed, construed, or invalidated in an AIA trial, and there is no estoppel-tainted record to exploit. Any invalidity case you build must be built from scratch.

Proceedings detail

None to report. Because the structured source lists no proceedings, there is no proceeding number, panel, institution decision, FWD, settlement, or appeal to describe. I will not invent one.

One important false-positive to flag. Search engines readily "correct" the number 10,495,450 to 10,447,450, and several hits you will see for a "'450 patent" belong to Neo Wireless LLC's U.S. Patent No. 10,447,450 — a multi-carrier wireless patent that has been through a long string of IPRs (e.g., American Honda, GM, Nissan & Tesla v. Neo Wireless, FWD 2024-11-01; Ford Motor Co. v. Neo Wireless, FWD 2025-09-03). Those proceedings have nothing to do with Nikon's 10,495,450 (imaging system / 3D shape-and-texture acquisition). Do not cite them in a brief on this patent.

Similarly, Nikon appears as a petitioner in unrelated PTAB matters (e.g., Nikon Corp. v. Optimum Imaging Technologies LLC, IPR2024-01373, on the '805 aberration-correction patent; and the older Nikon/Zeiss-ASML immersion-lithography IPRs on the '575 and '167 patents). Those show Nikon is PTAB-fluent, but they are not proceedings on this patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything is UNTESTED. The patent issued 2019-12-03 with an adjusted expiration of 2036-08-03, is currently active, and has undergone no AIA review. So the six-aspect claim set synthesized in the specification (independent apparatus, system, device, method, and storage-medium families, all built around a first imaging device that images a second imaging device's identification to derive the inter-camera positional relation) is intact, unamended, and never construed by the Board. There is no "surviving claims" list to hand a litigator — the whole patent survives by default.

Estoppel landscape: empty, in both directions. Because no IPR reached a final written decision on any claim, § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to no one on this patent. A defendant today faces no Credit Acceptance carve-outs to argue and no petitioner-privity chains to worry about, but also gets no shortcut: every § 102/§ 103 ground — printed publications, patents, and combinations — remains available to raise in the district court without any "reasonably could have raised" bar. The corollary is also true: nothing stops a third party (or your own litigation adversary) from filing the first IPR against this patent later and triggering estoppel against its own real parties in interest.

Pattern signals: none. No serial petitioner, no repeat filer, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents / RPX footprint found on this number). The absence of PTAB activity on a Nikon instrumentality patent is not surprising — Nikon is a large operating company that tends to assert and defend its camera/optics portfolio in district court and ITC rather than through the Board, and this particular patent reads on multi-camera 3D capture/modeling workflows, a modest slice of the portfolio. An absence of IPRs is a mild signal that the patent has not been a high-value assertion target — but it is emphatically not a validity signal.

Recommended next steps

• Treat the patent as fully live. No claim is canceled or narrowed by the Board. If a demand letter or complaint cites claims of 10,495,450, you cannot answer with a PTAB disposition — there is none. Verify the patent's current status and any prosecution-history amendments at USPTO PatentCenter (app. 15/716,984) and the Google Patents family page for US10495450B2.
• Confirm the negative before you rely on it. Re-check PTAB E2E and the USPTO Open Data Portal trial-proceedings endpoint at the time you brief this — a first petition could have been filed and not yet ingested. The ODP result is current only "as of the most recent ingest."
• If you are weighing your own IPR, mind the clock. Because the patent issued in 2019, PGR is long foreclosed; any challenge must be an IPR (§ 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications only), and § 315(b) gives you one year from service of a complaint naming you. If you have not yet been served, your window is wide open and there is no estoppel or Fintiv-style prior-institution baggage from this patent.
• Watch for the CAFC / district-court side. Since there is no PTAB record, the useful monitoring is district-court dockets and CourtListener for any infringement suits asserting this patent (Nikon as plaintiff), which would be the trigger for a future IPR and for § 315(b) timing. None surfaced in this sweep.
• Do not cite the Neo Wireless '450 decisions. Restate the number carefully (10,495,450 vs. 10,447,450) in any internal memo; the two are routinely conflated by search tools.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10,495,450, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and corroborating sources.

Let me dig deeper into the specific assignment records and the family/portfolio context.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,495,450

Data-access caveat (read first): My queries to the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) were limited by the search environment and did not return a clean per-patent assignment record page with reel/frame and correspondent fields. What I can state authoritatively is drawn from the Google Patents legal-events block in the supplied full text, which is derived from the same USPTO assignment data and shows exactly one recorded assignment (inventors → Nikon). I therefore report the conveyor names and dates with high confidence but flag the reel/frame and correspondent as not retrieved. I have not fabricated either field.

Inventors

Basis: Both are named on the face of the patent and both executed the assignment to Nikon ("Assignors: SUGIMURA, TAKEAKI, NAKAGAWA, YOSHIHIRO," Google Patents event dated 2017-09-27). Both list Nikon's Tokyo address as their inventor residence.

Departure / retainment pattern — no anomaly:

• These two are repeat Nikon inventors on the same 3D-imaging family, and they keep filing with Nikon years after this patent:
  • US 10,706,571 B2 — "Imaging device, image processing device, storage medium, and imaging system" — Sugimura & Nakagawa, granted 2020-07-07.
  • US 11,629,950 — "Detection device, detection system, detection method, and storage medium" — Nakagawa, Sugimura (+Yamariku), granted 2023-04-18.
  • US 12,203,744 — same title, granted 2025-01-21.
• Conclusion: No "inventors departed within 12 months of filing" red flag. The inventorship stayed with Nikon through at least 2025, which is the opposite of a fire-sale precursor.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Nikon Corporation (Tokyo, JP). The Google Patents record lists both Original Assignee and Current Assignee as Nikon Corp — i.e., no change of ownership on record.
• Primary line of business: Precision optics and imaging — interchangeable-lens cameras, lenses, and (historically the larger revenue engine) semiconductor lithography systems, plus microscopes and industrial metrology. Nikon is a publicly traded operating company (Tokyo Stock Exchange, ticker 7731).
• Product embodiment — unclear / not established: The claims cover a multi-camera system that builds shape/texture (3D) models and self-registers camera pose by optically reading a partner camera's identifier. Nikon has pursued 3D scanning/modeling, but I did not confirm a specific Nikon commercial product that practices these claims. Treat "ships a product embodying the claims" as unverified.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition of Nikon is on record or alleged in any of my searches. Nikon remains an active assignee named on 2023–2025 patents.

Assignment timeline

Only one recorded assignment exists in the chain.

• 2017-09-27 (executed) / recorded 2017-09-27 — Reel not retrieved / Frame not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment — recorded as "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)"
  • Assignor: Takeaki Sugimura; Yoshihiro Nakagawa
  • Assignee: Nikon Corporation
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — Assignment Center did not surface the recording attorney/firm in my queries; cannot confirm or deny a repeat-player correspondent. This is a data gap, not a negative finding.
  • Context: Initial, obligatory employment assignment of the inventors' rights to their employer, executed the same day the U.S. continuation was filed (2017-09-27). Not a fire-sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No post-issuance assignments. The patent granted 2019-12-03; there is no subsequent transfer, security agreement, license, name change, or release on record. Absent a recorded conveyance, Nikon Corporation retains ownership.

Related-chain note (not part of this chain): The patent is a continuation of PCT/JP2016/059906 (filed 2016-03-28), claiming priority to 2015-03-31 (JP2015-0075564, 2015-04-02). The PCT/national-stage route is why the U.S. filing date is 2017-09-27 rather than the 2015 priority date. This is a prosecution-route fact, not an ownership event.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10495450
    2015 : Priority JP application filed
    2016 : PCT application filed
    2017 : US continuation filed by Nikon
         : Inventors assign rights to Nikon
    2019 : Patent issued to Nikon
    2020 : Same inventors file more Nikon 3D cases
    2025 : Inventors still naming Nikon

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. No licensing-only LLC ever entered the chain. The sole recorded conveyance is inventors → Nikon Corporation (2017-09-27); current assignee remains Nikon.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. Neither Nikon nor any successor appears on the Acacia / Marathon / IV / Wi-LAN / Conversant / Vringo / Spangenberg or similar NPE rosters I searched. (Unified Patents' portal indexes this family under Nikon Corp as assignee, not an asserter.)

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNRESOLVED (data gap). Only one assignment exists, so a "recurrence" test is inapplicable. However, I could not retrieve the recording correspondent at all. Single appearance would not be a finding anyway under the rubric — I simply have no data here.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. Zero transfers, let alone chained LLC transfers in <24 months.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. No infringement suit naming this patent was found (per the earlier litigation section), and no assignment is dated within 6 months of any such suit. The only assignment predates issuance by ~2 years.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. Nikon's corporate status is operating; no Chapter 7/11 proceeding or patent auction involves this asset.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT. No transfer from Nikon to an assertion vehicle; the patent has never left Nikon.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN. That "vaccination" signal is absent — meaning the patent simply remains a Nikon operating asset, not that it was neutralized by a defensive buyer.

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the rubric's technical sense of "only the original assignment," but with the substantive takeaway that there is no NPE chain: the entire recorded history is a single inventor-to-employer assignment to Nikon Corporation dated 2017-09-27 (Google Patents legal events; current assignee unchanged), and no post-issuance transfer, security interest, or asserter appears anywhere in the record. Because the chain contains no transfer to a licensing entity and no NPE indicator whatsoever, no NPE signal can be positively scored; the one field I could not obtain (the recording correspondent / reel-frame) is a research gap, not evidence of impropriety. The honest bottom line is: Nikon retains ownership; no troll-pattern evidence exists.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search "10495450") and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — confirm the reel/frame and correspondent for the 2017-09-27 inventor assignment, and confirm the absence of any later record. Cross-check Nikon's SEC filings (no 10-K/8-K discloses a sale of this asset) and the RPX / Unified Patents asserter directories (no listing under this number).

Limitations: (a) reel/frame and correspondent not retrieved — reported as unknown rather than guessed; (b) whether Nikon ships a product embodying the claims is unverified; (c) I treated the patent number literally and excluded similarly numbered non-matching patents.

I'll search for the specific patent's citation records. Let me run targeted queries.

Answer: Prior-art citations for US 10,495,450 — scope, findings, and limits

Important limitation up front (read first). I was asked to "look at each patent citation for 10,495,450." I could not retrieve the examiner's front‑page "References Cited" list (U.S. Patent Documents / Foreign Patent Documents / Other Publications) from the USPTO record. The authoritative full text supplied in the prompt reproduces the specification, abstract, classifications, and figures list but omits the front‑page citation block and the Google Patents "Citations/Cited By" tables. My live searches for that block returned substantial noise (unrelated patents with similar numbers such as US 10,447,450 (Neo Wireless), US 11,061,450 (Cooler Master), and various Nikon EP/JPO search reports for different applications). I therefore report (a) the one citation that is confirmed from the authoritative text, (b) candidate references in the patent's citation graph that I retrieved but could not fully confirm as examiner‑cited, and (c) a clear statement of what remains unverified. I am not fabricating a citation list.

Reference A — CONFIRMED (cited on the face of the specification)

Full citation: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2010‑134546 A ("Patent Literature 1")
Publication date: 2010 (publication year encoded in the number; the exact day was not provided in the text I hold and I will not guess it)
Status vs. priority: Published ~2010, i.e., more than one year before the 2015‑03‑31 priority date → qualifies as prior art under AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)(1) (and would have been § 102(b) under pre‑AIA).

Brief description (as characterized in the patent itself): Discloses a technique that "detects an object by a plurality of imaging devices and inputs a plurality of obtained images to a computer to acquire a three‑dimensional shape of the object." It is cited as the general backdrop for multi‑camera 3D acquisition, not as the point of novelty.

What it discloses vs. the independent claims (Aspects 1–4):

• Discloses: a plurality of imaging devices imaging an object; input of the captured images to a computer to derive a 3D shape. This maps to the "first detector/first imager imaging an object" and "first information calculator … calculates shape information" elements of Aspect 1 / Aspect 3 and the corresponding method steps of Aspect 4.
• Does not disclose the distinguishing elements: a second body carrying identification information that is detected by the first imager, and a position acquirer that derives the positional relation between the two detectors from that identification information (nor the "specific part on a side face" variant of Aspect 2).

§ 102 conclusion: Does not anticipate any of the independent claims (Aspects 1–4/claims 1, etc.). It is § 102 background art for the generic multi‑camera‑3D‑capture environment, and at most § 103 material when combined with a secondary reference teaching optical identification of one camera by another.

References B and C — CANDIDATE / TENTATIVE (retrieved from the family's citation graph, NOT confirmed as examiner‑cited)

These surfaced in my searches as documents linked to US 2018/0017379 A1 (the pre‑grant publication of this exact application, US 15/716,984). Their appearance in the citation graph suggests they may be cited references, but I could not confirm the direction/category from the snippets, so treat these as tentative.

Reference B

• Full citation: US 6,664,531 B2 — "Combined stereovision, color 3D digitizing and motion capture system"
• Dates: Published/granted 2003‑12‑16 (filing in the early 2000s)
• Description: Stereovision‑based system combining color 3D digitizing with motion capture — i.e., multi‑camera three‑dimensional scanning with texture/color capture and camera calibration.
• § 102 mapping: Potentially relevant § 102(a)(1) art against claims reciting multi‑view shape and texture calculation (Aspect 1's "at least one of shape information and texture information"). However, it does not appear to teach the claimed identification‑information‑based position acquirer, so it likely does not anticipate the independent claims.

Reference C

• Full citation: US 2015/0178900 A1, issued as US 10,402,956 B2 — "Depth image processing apparatus and method based on camera pose conversion" (original assignee: Hand Held Products, Inc.)
• Dates: Filed 2014‑10‑10; published 2015‑06‑25; granted 2019‑09‑03
• Description: Processing depth images by converting them between camera poses (coordinate‑frame transformation of depth data).
• § 102 mapping: Because it published after the 2015‑03‑31 priority date, it is not § 102(a)(1) art. As a U.S. application publication effectively filed (2014‑10‑10) before the priority date it could only be § 102(a)(2) art (and only for subject matter it actually describes). It is relevant to the coordinate‑transformation/integration steps (e.g., the model integrator's transformation of the second coordinate system into the first), not to the identification‑information‑based position acquisition. Does not anticipate the independent claims.

Overall § 102 assessment against the six claim aspects

Based on the references I could confirm or tentatively identify, none anticipates the independent claims. The common inventive core — automatic, vision‑based determination of camera‑to‑camera geometry where one imager detects the other body's identification information (or a specific part on an imaged side face) and a position acquirer derives the detectors' positional relation from that detection — is not disclosed by:

• JP 2010‑134546 A (background multi‑camera 3D shape capture only), or
• the tentative US references (3D digitizing/pose conversion without the identification‑based position acquirer).

They are best characterized as § 102 background art (JP 2010‑134546; possibly US 6,664,531) and one possible § 102(a)(2) reference (US 10,402,956 / US 2015/0178900 A1), with potential § 103 combinations.

Secondary reference (in‑family): The patent states it is a continuation of PCT/JP2016/059906 (filed 2016‑03‑28), whose international search report may list additional art; I did not retrieve that search report either, so its citations are likewise unverified.

What I could not verify (and how to close it out)

I was unable to confirm the complete examiner citation list for US 10,495,450 — i.e., the full "References Cited" block (U.S. patent documents, foreign patent documents, and non‑patent literature). To produce a defensible, line‑by‑line § 102 table keyed to the verbatim claim numbers, pull the front page from:

1. USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter — application 15/716,984 / patent 10,495,450 (the "References Cited" block on the granted front page).
2. Google Patents — https://patents.google.com/patent/US10495450B2/en → "Citations" (backward), "Cited By" (forward), and "Similar Documents" tabs.
3. EPO / JPO family — the regional/JP counterparts of PCT/JP2016/059906 (their search reports list X/Y‑category art mapped to claims).

I also flag the earlier sections' caveat: the patent's verbatim independent claim numbers were not in the fetched text (only six "aspects"), so all claim‑number mappings above are inferred from the aspects and should be confirmed against the granted claim set before being relied upon. And, consistent with the prior litigation summary, no litigation or CAFC activity involving this number was found.

If you can authorize a direct pull from USPTO PatentCenter or the Google Patents "Citations" tab, I will return the full, per‑reference table (citation, date, description, and § 102/§ 103 mapping to each verbatim claim).

I'll research the prior art applicable to US 10,495,450, starting with the reference cited on the patent's face and the general state of the art.

Let me pull the Google Patents record for this patent to see its cited prior art and similar documents, and identify the face-cited reference.

Let me confirm the face-cited reference and look for additional prior art on multi-camera pose self-registration and marker-based calibration.

I hit the tool-call limit, so the following is built on the patent text you supplied, the face-cited reference, and the prior art I was able to retrieve relevant to the 2015-03-31 priority date. I flag confidence levels explicitly and do not invent reference numbers.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,495,450 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope caveats you should read first

1. The claim set is not verbatim available to me. The authoritative text supplies six enumerated "aspects" that conventionally track the independents. I analyze those aspects as the independent claims. Any dependent-claim analysis below is reconstructed from the specification's described features, not from confirmed claim language. Treat aspect/claim mapping as probable, not confirmed (consistent with the earlier summary section).
2. The "Prior Art section of this page" is thin. The Google Patents fetch contains only (a) prior-art keywords ("information, imager, imaging device, imaging, controller") and (b) one face-cited reference: Patent Literature 1 = Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2010‑134546. The "Cited By" / "Similar Documents" lists were not included in the fetched content. My earlier searches also returned no litigation/PTAB/CAFC record for this number. Accordingly, the combinations below are assembled from the face-cited reference plus well-established art in multi-view geometry and camera extrinsic calibration, and I label confidence for each.
3. Priority/filing date. Priority 2015-03-31; PCT filed 2016-03-28; U.S. filed 2017-09-27. This is an AIA case, so § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) and § 103 with KSR govern. Any reference must predate 2015-03-31 (or qualify as § 102(a)(2) art).
4. Family members are NOT prior art. US 10,638,113, US 10,706,571, US 2019/0043212, US 2023/0221110, US 11,629,950 (all Nikon, all retrieved via justia.com and sharing the same priority) are continuations of the same family and therefore cannot be used against this patent. Likewise US 2024/0233180, US 11,308,645, US 11,941,840, and US 2022/0122286 post-date 2015-03-31 and are not § 103 art here.

1. Legal framework applied

• Graham v. John Deere factors: scope/content of claims; differences from prior art; level of ordinary skill; secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l v. Teleflex: a claim is obvious if the differences are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious; combinations of known elements according to known methods yielding predictable results are obvious; a known technique applied to a known device, ready for improvement, is obvious.
• The patent's own background concedes the problem: "When information indicating a positional relation between the imaging devices that detect the object is insufficient, it is difficult to associate a plurality of detection results … with each other with high precision." This is an admission of the problem the claimed solution addresses and materially strengthens an obviousness case, because the motivation to solve it comes from the applicant.

Level of ordinary skill (proposed): a B.S. in EE/CS/optics (or equivalent) plus ~2–3 years' experience in computer vision / 3D metrology, including familiarity with multi-camera calibration, epipolar geometry, and triangulation. Marker-based extrinsic calibration is squarely within this skill level.

2. Prior-art inventory

3. Independent Aspect 1 (system) — element mapping and the primary combination

Primary combination: PL1 (JP 2010‑134546) in view of US 2008/0095416, optionally with Zhang 2000.

Why the combination is proper (KSR rationales):

• Same field / same problem. PL1's whole purpose is fusing multiple camera views of one object; that fusion is impossible without the inter-camera geometric relation, and the patent's own background admits this. KSR rationale: "known technique to improve similar device in the same way."
• Predictable result. Marker-based extrinsic calibration (Zhang; ARToolKit; US 2008/0095416) was routine and reliable by 2015; substituting it for manual survey or feature-matching registration yields the expected result — a known baseline/pose.
• The patent's own motivation. The specification touts reduced/omitted feature-point matching and reduced communication load; both are natural, predictable consequences of knowing the baseline.

Confidence that Aspect 1 as written is obvious: high, provided "identification information" is read broadly (a code/sticker/tag on the second body) as the specification itself describes (figures, characters, barcodes, LED patterns, diffraction gratings). If a trier reads "identification information" narrowly as unique device-identity data (a device ID, distinguishable per unit), the combination still reads on US 2008/0095416 + 2D-code identity art, but the mapping is cleaner if one adds a machine-readable tag carrying device ID (barcode/QR), which is ubiquitous.

4. Independent Aspect 2 (side-face variant) — mapping

Aspect 2 replaces the "identification information" with "a specific part on the side face imaged by the first imager."

• JP 3095463 B is the strongest single reference here: it disposes reference point members within the fields of view of two cameras, images them to obtain angles, and computes the relative positional relationship between the members and the cameras, then camera poses — followed by triangulation. A reference point member mounted on the second camera body is a "specific part on a side face."
• Zhang 2000 independently establishes that a planar pattern with known geometry (a checkerboard is a "specific part on a face") yields full pose — distance and attitude — from a single image, exactly the "size/affine-transform" reasoning the specification attributes to the position acquirer.
• Motivation: identical to Aspect 1 (need the baseline to fuse models); the side-face marking is simply the known marker placed on the second camera instead of on the object.

Confidence: high that Aspect 2 is obvious over JP 3095463 B alone or JP 3095463 B + Zhang 2000 (+ PL1 for the object-modeling context).

5. Aspect 3 (device), Aspect 4 (method), Aspects 5–6 (program/storage medium)

• Aspect 3 is the same subject matter from the first device's perspective (a position acquirer that uses a result obtained by detecting identification information of a second body to get the positional relation). It rises and falls with Aspect 1; if Aspect 1 is obvious, Aspect 3 is obvious — it is a recitation of the same apparatus from one node's viewpoint.
• Aspect 4 is the method counterpart. Where a system and its constituent device are obvious, the method practiced by them is obvious as a matter of course (KSR; "method" claims add nothing beyond the steps the apparatus performs).
• Aspects 5–6 are program/storage-medium claims. It is black-letter that implementing a known method in software to be executed by a general-purpose processor is an obvious design choice absent some unexpected technical effect. The specification provides none; indeed the "reduce communication load" rationale is itself the predictable benefit of offloading/segmenting processing.

Confidence: high for aspects 3–6 as obvious corollaries.

6. Dependent-claim features (reconstructed — FLAG: not confirmed as claims)

If these are claimed, they are individually weak:

7. Secondary considerations (objective indicia)

• No evidence of nexus-driving objective indicia is available to me. My earlier litigation search found no litigation, PTAB, or CAFC activity for this patent, so there is no record of commercial-success-to-claim nexus to weigh.
• The owner (Nikon) is a large, established camera maker; any commercial success in a multi-camera 3D capture product would need a strong nexus showing it is attributable to the claimed ID-based pose acquirer rather than to generic camera quality — no such evidence was retrieved.
• Note: an earlier section flagged that Nikon is a litigation party in unrelated matters (Carl Zeiss/ASML v. Nikon, ITC 337-TA-1059, Nikon v. Viltrox) and that a same-numbered patent 10,447,450 (Neo Wireless) is heavily litigated — those are different patents and provide no priority/reduction-to-practice evidence for 10,495,450.

8. Where the claims could survive (defenses the applicant would raise)

Be balanced — the strongest non-obviousness arguments are:

1. PL1 alone does not disclose ID-based position acquisition. PL1's correspondence is by pattern-light/pixel matching, not by reading an identity tag. So PL1 alone is insufficient; the case depends on the secondary references and a motivation to combine. A patentee can argue the examiner must articulate a concrete reason why a skilled artisan would place an identity-bearing marker on the second camera body rather than continue using pattern-light matching.
2. "Identification information" breadth. If construed narrowly (unique device ID with per-unit registration), a patentee may argue the prior art markers were anonymous fiducials, not "identification information." Counter: 2D-code/ARToolKit tags carry identity, and disclosure of the function (identity → pose) is enough under KSR.
3. The specific distributed architecture (first camera both images the object and computes its own model and images the second body's ID). This is arguably a specific combination; but each element is known and the combination yields predictable benefits the specification itself recites.

None of these is compelling against a properly articulated KSR combination, but they are the likely battleground — and they hinge on the exact claim language, which I have not confirmed.

9. Bottom line

• Aspect 1 (broadest system claim) is likely obvious over JP 2010‑134546 (PL1) in view of US 2008/0095416 A1 and/or JP 3095463 B, with Zhang 2000 supplying the planar-marker pose method — motivation: fusing multiple cameras' partial 3D models requires the inter-camera relation, which the patent's own background concedes.
• Aspect 2 is likely obvious over JP 3095463 B (reference members within camera fields of view → relative position/pose) and/or Zhang 2000.
• Aspects 3–6 are obvious corollaries (device viewpoint; method; software implementation of a known method).
• Constructed dependent features (movement detector, position database, timestamps, diffraction/LED identifiers) are individually predictable design choices.

Caveats / confidence:

• High on the technical thrust and on Aspects 3–6.
• Medium-high on Aspect 1, because it depends on the secondary marker-calibration art and the breadth of "identification information,"
• Lower on the precise PL1→US family mapping and on the JP 3095463 B / JP 2013‑122434 A details, which I have only via a secondary quotation (US 10,546,381, https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/de/27/f6/21cddc0fcf4cd1/US10546381.pdf).
• I could not retrieve the prosecution file history or the Google Patents "Cited By/Similar Documents" lists, so this is a from-first-principles § 103 analysis, not a reproduction of what the examiner actually did.

To close the analysis definitively, pull: (1) the verbatim claim set (Google Patents "Claims" section / USPTO PatentCenter for US 15/716,984); (2) the file wrapper (applied references/office actions); and (3) the family's JP prosecution for JP 2010‑134546's exact identity.

Retrieved sources relied on: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10495450/en; https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080095416; https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-20100091301-A1; https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b0/ab/86/3e8ba43601c366/US9197880.pdf; https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/de/27/f6/21cddc0fcf4cd1/US10546381.pdf; https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ac/a3/47/a1dae93b3e2442/US11308645.pdf.