US 11210526

I'll verify the current status of US 11,210,526 against live sources before summarizing.

Let me check the litigation dockets and any appellate activity specific to this patent.

Verification summary — US 11,210,526 B2

I ran targeted searches against Google Patents/patentimages (the patent's own front page and full text) and against litigation docket sources (RPX Empower, Justia Dockets, Justia federal district cases, govinfo, VitalLaw IP Law Daily). Findings below; items I could not confirm are flagged.

Bibliographic data (confirmed)

Sources: the patent front page at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/56/8f/db/0f45ee8014cffe/US11210526.pdf and https://patents.google.com/patent/US11210526B2/en.

Abstract (verbatim, as printed)

"A video processing apparatus includes a video analyzer that analyzes video data captured by a surveillance camera, detects an event belonging to a specific category, and outputs a detection result, a display controller that displays, together with a video of the video data, a category setting screen for setting a category of an event included in the video, and a learning data accumulator that accumulates, as learning data together with the video data, category information set in accordance with an operation by an operator to the category setting screen. The video analyzer performs learning processing by using the learning data accumulated in the learning data accumulator."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Note: the abstract and "Solution to Problem" text describe the original application claims (video analyzer / display controller / learning data accumulator), but the granted claim set is different — it is drafted around "regions." The overview below follows the granted claims as printed (Claims (20) on the Google Patents page).

Claim 1 — video processing system. A computer system (memory + processor) analyzes a video containing an object and: (1) detects a first region that corresponds to a predetermined category and that indicates the object — i.e., it finds the object and boxes/segments it under an existing label; (2) accepts a second region designated by a human operator that is a part of the object and lies inside that first region — i.e., the operator drills down and marks a sub-part (e.g., a portion of the object, not the whole thing); (3) creates a new category corresponding to that part, where the new category has a name typed in by the operator and is different from the predetermined category; and (4) stores the video data of that second region as machine-learning training data, tagged with the operator-supplied name of the new category. In short: operator selects a sub-region of an already-detected object, names a brand-new category for it, and that sub-region video becomes labeled training data.

Claim 6 — video processing method. The same four-step process (detect first region → acquire operator-designated second region within it → generate operator-named new category → accumulate the second region's video as learning data) recited as a method.

Claim 9 — non-transitory recording medium. The same four-step process embodied as a computer program stored on a non-transitory computer-readable medium.

Dependent-claim highlights (not independent, but they show the scope): claim 2 (and 7, 10) — after learning on the accumulated data, automatically detect a third region corresponding to the new category; claim 3 (and 8, 11) — compute and save an operator "point" from a learning-video count and new-category count tied to an operator ID; claim 4 — an incentive table linking those counts and points to the operator ID; claim 5 — weight the point by the degree of importance of the video; claims 12–13/15–16/18–19 — display the second region inside the first region on the video and accept the operator's on-video positioning operation; claims 14/17/20 — the object is a moving object.

Litigation status (confirmed via docket sources)

• E.D. Va. 1:24-cv-01870 — Power Mobile Life, LLC et al. v. NEC Corporation, filed Oct. 24, 2024, declaratory judgment of non-infringement (35 U.S.C. § 1 / Nature of Suit 830), Judge Leonie M. Brinkema. Ordered transferred to the Eastern District of Texas on Nov. 1, 2024; opened there as 2:24-cv-00881 on Nov. 4, 2024. (https://dockets.justia.com/docket/virginia/vaedce/1:2024cv01870/562335; https://litigation.rpxcorp.com/litigation/vaedce-562335-power-mobile-life-v-nec)
• E.D. Tex. 2:24-cv-00720-JRG — NEC Corporation v. Anker Innovations Technology Co., Ltd. et al, Judge J. Rodney Gilstrap. NEC asserted six patents against Anker smart-doorbell products; the asserted set included the '526 patent. Anker moved for judgment on the pleadings under Rule 12(c)/(§ 101). On June 3–4, 2026 the court denied the motion in all respects: it held the '526 claims are directed to the abstract idea of "labeling data regions to train a machine learning model" (citing Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., 134 F.4th 1205 (Fed. Cir. 2025)), but that NEC's factual allegations of unconventionality — specifically the "second region within the first region," operator-named new category, and accumulation of the second region's video as learning data — were plausible enough to survive Alice step two at the pleadings stage. The '467 patent claims were found not abstract; the '240 patent was dropped from the case. (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/txedce/2:2024cv00720/232678/122/; https://www.vitallaw.com/news/patent-e-d-tex-object-detection-patents-did-not-succumb-to-invalidity-challenges/ipm011d7fa48e115b40a9b0a0c1abb7459de0)

Federal Circuit / CAFC 2026 dockets — not found

I did not locate any Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2026 docket, opinion, or appeal that names US 11,210,526. My searches for a 2026 Federal Circuit appeal tied to this number returned only unrelated Federal Circuit material (e.g., Gramm v. Deere & Co., No. 2024-1598 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 11, 2026); the Spero/Mercedes IPR rehearing petition, No. 25-1470 (June 15, 2026); and certiorari papers in a separate § 112(f) case). I cannot confirm the existence or absence of a CAFC 2026 appeal involving 11,210,526, since district-court dockets and Federal Circuit dockets are the authoritative sources and I only had indirect web access to them. Treat the litigation items above as provisional until checked on PACER/CM-ECF.

Uncertainty notes

• I am confident in the bibliographic fields and claim text because they come from the patent's own front page and full text.
• The expiration date (Aug. 17, 2034) and "Active" legal status are Google Patents' algorithmic assumptions (Google explicitly disclaims that these are legal conclusions), so they should not be relied on as a legal conclusion.
• The "relevant timeline" in the 2:24-cv-00720 docket source references dates into mid-2026 (Markman order June 26, 2026; expert discovery closed May 29, 2026), which is consistent with the June 2026 eligibility ruling — but please confirm those docket entries against PACER.
• One caveat on the family: Google Patents lists numerous continuations from the same 2013 priority family (US 10,275,657; US 11,729,347; US 12,323,730; US 12,542,864; US 12,563,154; US 12,574,469; US 12,549,678; and pending US 2024/0348742 and US 2025/0324015). These are different patents and should not be conflated with 11,210,526.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 11210526. Let me search multiple sources.

Let me dig deeper into the specific cases identified.

Based on my research, here is what I found for US Patent 11,210,526 ("the '526 Patent"), titled "Video Surveillance System, Video Processing Apparatus, Video Processing Method, and Video Processing Program," owned by NEC Corporation.

⚠️ Note on scope: I searched specifically for 11,210,526 and excluded other "112" / "'526" patents (e.g., the Sandpiper CDN '112 patent and the NEC '265 patent that appear in PTAB filings are different patents). I found no PTAB/IPR or Federal Circuit proceeding directed at the '526 Patent itself — the known activity is district-court litigation.

1. NEC Corporation v. Anker Innovations Technology Co., Ltd. and Anker Innovations Ltd. (d/b/a "eufy")

Sources: VitalLaw/IP Law Daily summary (Jun 11, 2026); NEC complaint (E.D. Tex. 2:24-cv-00720); CourtListener opinion; Law360 ("NEC Hits Anker With New Patent Suit, Days Before EDTX Trial").

2. Power Mobile Life, LLC and Fantasia Trading, LLC (d/b/a AnkerDirect) v. NEC Corporation

Sources: Dockets.Justia (2:24-cv-00881); RPX Empower (1:24-cv-01870); Ex Parte case page.

Notes / Caveats

• Which patents a case touches: The Google Patents litigation links for this patent's family list three U.S. cases — E.D. Va. 1:24-cv-01870, E.D. Tex. 2:24-cv-00881, and E.D. Tex. 2:24-cv-00720. As analyzed above, 1:24-cv-01870 and 2:24-cv-00881 are the same DJ action (Virginia filing transferred to Texas), and 2:24-cv-00720 is the NEC v. Anker infringement case. Only these two matters appear to implicate the '526 Patent.
• Not the '526: A newer NEC v. Anker suit (E.D. Tex. 2:26-cv-00847, filed ~September 18, 2026) asserts six different NEC patents (US 10,223,619; 10,552,713; 10,706,336; 11,144,776; 12,423,985; 12,641,315) — not the '526.
• No IPR/CAFC found: I did not identify any inter partes review, PGR, or Federal Circuit appeal naming US 11,210,526. (PTAB filings referencing a "'112 patent" or a "'265 patent" concern other patents.)
• Source reliability: These findings rely on secondary databases (Google Patents family-litigation data, Law360/VitalLaw, RPX, Dockets.Justia, Ex Parte) rather than a direct PACER/Unified Patents docket pull. I could not independently verify a final verdict in the E.D. Tex. infringement action; based on the most recent available reporting it was proceeding toward a late-September-2026 trial with the § 101 and claim-construction issues resolved against Anker's positions.
• Date note: Several search results reference events dated after April 2026 (June and September 2026). I have reported them as found rather than treating them as impossible; if you are working from a strict April 26, 2026 cutoff, the June 4, 2026 eligibility ruling, June 26, 2026 Markman order, and September 2026 trial/suit would not yet have occurred.

PTAB activity on US 11,210,526 ("Video surveillance system, video processing apparatus, video processing method, and video processing program," NEC Corp.)

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (zero). The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for US 11,210,526, and independent web searches for an IPR/PGR on this patent number surfaced nothing. The breakdown is therefore: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0. The bottom line for a defendant is that this patent is completely untested at the PTAB — the entire claim set (claims 1–20) remains live, with no cancellation, no estoppel, and no PTAB record to attack or lean on. The only adjudicative record touching the '526 claims is district court, and it currently favors NEC: Judge Gilstrap denied Anker's Rule 12(c) § 101 motion on 2026-06-03, letting the '526 claims past Alice step two. This is the opposite of a "hardened" patent and also the opposite of a "claims canceled" patent — it is an open flank.

No proceeding to detail

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} entry to report. Anything below would be invention, which the constraint set forbids.

A few near-misses surfaced during search that are not AIA trials against this patent, flagged so you don't confuse them with the '526:

• Dell Technologies v. NEC — IPR briefing on an NEC patent identified as the '177 patent (OpenFlow/ONF licensing dispute). Different NEC patent, not the '526. (petition excerpt)
• Sandpiper CDN, LLC v. Google LLC (C.D. Cal. 2:24-cv-03951) — petition paperwork referring to a "'112 patent" in that case; not US 11,210,526 and not an NEC patent. (petition excerpt)
• The "Family has litigation" / Unified Patents and Darts-IP links on the Google Patents page for US 11,210,526 point to district court dockets (E.D. Va. 1:24-cv-01870; E.D. Tex. 2:24-cv-00881 and 2:24-cv-00720), not to PTAB trials.
• Anker does file IPRs — e.g., IPR2024-00995/-00996 against Powermat (one terminated Settled on 2026-03-24). That is a pattern signal, not a proceeding on this patent.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims UNTESTED at the PTAB. Claims 1–5, 6–8, and 9–11 (the system, method, and CRM independent claims, respectively) are the ones NEC is asserting — the E.D. Tex. declaratory-judgment pleadings identify "Independent claims 1, 6, and 9" of the '526 as asserted. None has been canceled, confirmed, or even challenged in an AIA trial. There is no narrowing certificate, no certificate of correction from a PTAB trial, and no IPR-driven amendment. Whatever the '526 claims say today is what they said at issuance on 2021-12-28.

Estoppel landscape: none. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel does not apply to anyone on this patent. Every art-based ground that a defendant could have raised is still available in district court — § 102/§ 103 over patents and printed publications, plus § 101 and § 112 attacks that the PTAB could not have heard in an IPR anyway. There is no petitioner-side stipulation (Sotera-type) wiping out parallel invalidity defenses either.

The flip side is the filing bar. 35 U.S.C. § 315(b): a petition must be filed within one year of service of a complaint alleging infringement. NEC's E.D. Tex. complaint against Anker was filed 2024-09-03, so on the face of the public docket the one-year window for Anker to petition against the '526 expired in September 2025. Anker's own DJ action (E.D. Va. 1:24-cv-01870, filed 2024-10-24, transferred to E.D. Tex. as 2:24-cv-00881) is a non-infringement declaratory action, which ordinarily does not itself trigger § 315(b) — but the NEC complaint does. Practically: if you are a defendant served more than a year ago, you are likely time-barred from an IPR; if you were served recently, the IPR door is still open and there is no prior-petitioner estoppel or Fintiv/Sotera baggage to contend with.

Pattern signals. NEC is an operating-company plaintiff actively enforcing a portfolio (the '240, '467, '995, '635, '526, '814, and '160 patents) rather than a PAE. It has shown willingness to litigate nationally (E.D. Tex. plus a transfer fight out of E.D. Va.) and has not been forced to defend a single PTAB trial on the '526 in roughly two years of assertion. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) is in the chain for this patent. Anker's demonstrated appetite for IPR (Powermat) makes the absence of an Anker IPR on the '526 conspicuous — the most likely explanation is the § 315(b) clock, with the § 101 motion used instead.

Recommended next steps

• There is no FWD to link to. If a demand letter or complaint cites the '526, you cannot point to a PTAB disposition canceling any claim — because none exists. Do not represent otherwise to a court or adversary.
• The live defense is § 101, and it got past step two once. Judge Gilstrap's 2026-06-03 memorandum opinion and order (E.D. Tex. No. 2:24-cv-00720-JRG, Dkt. 122) found the '526 claims directed to the abstract idea of "labeling data to train a machine learning model" at Alice step one, but denied the motion because NEC pleaded plausible unconventionality as to claim 1's (i) acquiring a second operator-designated region within a first region, (ii) generating a new operator-named category, and (iii) accumulating that region's video as learning data. Full text: Justia Docket 122 and CourtListener. Step two was a pleadings-stage loss, not a merits loss — summary judgment with an expert record is a different fight.
• Confirm the real docket state before relying on § 315(b). Check the PTAB E2E / Patent Trial and Appeal Board docket at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb and the USPTO PTAB decisions page for any petition filed after the ODP ingest, and check your own service date under § 315(b). If you are a newly served defendant (or a customer of an accused product), the calculus differs from Anker's: you are not bound by any prior petitioner's choices, and there is no estoppel or Fintiv record to argue around.
• Watch the parallel NEC patents for PTAB signals. A challenge to a sibling patent (e.g., the '814 or '467) would not estop anything on the '526, but it would signal whether anyone is willing to spend on this family and could produce useful claim-construction and prior-art findings.
• Date/status caveat: all positions above are based on public dockets and reporting as of the sources cited (latest reporting 2026-06-06). The ODP block is the canonical PTAB list; I found nothing contradicting it, but a recently-filed petition may simply not have been indexed or reported yet.

I'll research the assignment chain for US 11210526, cross-referencing the patent's legal events with USPTO records and litigation data.

Let me dig deeper into the NEC ownership status, the asserter identity, and any assignment records.

US 11210526 — Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction

Patent: US 11,210,526 B2 — "Video surveillance system, video processing apparatus, video processing method, and video processing program"
Application: US 16/289,760 (Continuation of US 14/899,191 → US 10,275,657; National Stage of PCT/JP2014/066777)
Priority: JP 2013-136953, filed 2013-06-28 · Issued: 2021-12-28 · Adjusted expiration: 2034-08-17

Data-access caveat (read first): I could not return a live payload from USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) in this session, so I cannot transcribe a reel/frame number or a correspondent of record with confidence. The authoritative text I do have — the full patent document plus its mirrored Google Patents legal events — shows only one recorded assignment (inventors → NEC Corporation) and no post-issuance transfer. Everything below is grounded in that record plus federal-court dockets. Where I lack a value (reel/frame, correspondent), I say so rather than invent it.

Inventors

Pattern notes: No unusual signals. Both inventors are NEC personnel who assigned to NEC as a matter of standard corporate practice. I found no evidence of either inventor departing NEC within 12 months of filing, and note that any such claim would require employment/HR data I do not have — so I am not asserting it. There is no "inventor exodus before fire-sale" pattern here.

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: NEC Corporation (Nippon Electric Company, Ltd.), Tokyo, Japan — a publicly traded, still-operating global electronics / IT / AI conglomerate (Tokyo Stock Exchange; files annual reports, e.g. FY2025-03 integrated report at nec.com).
• Primary line of business: IT and network solutions, AI/analytics, communications, computing, and security/surveillance systems. The patent itself is directed to a data-center video-surveillance analytics platform — i.e., a product context NEC actually operates in (video surveillance / analytics and behavior-detection offerings).
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Likely yes — NEC is a diversified operating company with commercial video-surveillance/analytics lines, and the patent is being asserted by NEC itself as a practicing-company plaintiff (see below). I could not obtain a specific product SKU mapping claim 1 within this session, so treat "ships an embodying product" as supported but not fully verified.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition of NEC.

Assignment timeline

Records located (Google Patents legal-events mirror of the USPTO record):

• 2019-03-01 (recorded) / Reel not retrieved — verify at Assignment Center
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: HISADA, Daichi; MORIBE, Takeshi
  • Assignee: NEC CORPORATION (Tokyo, JP)
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved — the mirror does not surface the correspondent of record. This field should be read directly off the Assignment Center entry; I will not guess it.
  • Context: Ordinary inventor-to-employer assignment, recorded on filing of this continuation. Not a reorg, not a sale, not securitization.

No other assignment records were found. There is no post-issuance transfer, no shell-LLC hop, and no NPE assignment on this patent's record. If the Assignment Center likewise returns a single entry, that is itself the finding: NEC still owns US 11,210,526.

Relevant surrounding facts (not assignments to this patent)

• 2014-06-25: PCT/JP2014/066777 filed by NEC (WO2014208575A1). — prosecution step, not an assignment.
• 2024-03 (context, OTHER patents): A broad NEC patent portfolio was reportedly sold to an "intellectual property asset management" purchaser "through an intermediary," with the acquirer then suing Dell on several NEC-origin server patents. (See Unified Patents / PTAB IPR briefing referencing the '265 and '632 patents.) The '526 patent does not appear to be part of that sale — NEC was still asserting '526 against Anker in September 2024.
• Early 2024 (context, OTHER patents): Reporting (Sisvel) describes ~200 NEC-affiliated patents moving to IP Wave Pte. (Singapore) and then to Cloud Byte LLC, tied to optical-transmission assets. Not the '526 (video analytics) family.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11210526
    2013 : NEC files JP priority application
    2014 : NEC files PCT application
    2015 : US national stage entered
    2019 : Continuation filed
         : Inventors assign to NEC Corporation
    2021 : Patent issues to NEC Corporation
    2024 : NEC sues Anker over this patent

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No operating-to-licensing-LLC transfer appears in the record. The only assignment is inventors → NEC Corporation. Owner remains the operating parent.

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT.
Current and prior assignee is NEC Corporation, which is not on the RPX / Unified / Acacia / Marathon / Intellectual Ventures / Wi-LAN / Conversant / Vringo type lists. The high-frequency-plaintiff entities that surface in the related NEC portfolio cases are third parties that bought OTHER NEC patents (the unnamed "IP asset management" acquirer suing Dell; IP Wave / Cloud Byte for optical assets) — none of which is a recorded assignee of US 11,210,526.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — INSUFFICIENT DATA.
The chain has one link and the correspondent was not retrievable this session. No finding can be made either way.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
No chained LLC-to-LLC sequence within 24 months. Single recorded link.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT.
The only assignment (2019-03-01) predates the 2024 suits by ~5 years and is an inventor assignment, not a pre-suit standing transfer.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
NEC has not filed for bankruptcy; no proceedings involve this patent.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT (inverted).
The operating company (NEC) is itself the plaintiff asserting the patent — NEC Corporation v. Anker Innovations Technology Co., Ltd. et al., 2:24-cv-00720 (E.D. Tex.), filed ~2024-09-03, asserting the '526 patent (claims 1/6/9) against Anker's eufy smart-doorbell/camera products ("AI learning functionality"). This is direct, first-party operating-company assertion, not privateering.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN. Instead it terminates at an operating company actively litigating.

Note on the "NPE-flavored" activity here — it is on the other side of the 'v':
The two dockets Google Patents flags are actually one declaratory-judgment action brought against NEC: Power Mobile Life, LLC et al v. NEC Corporation, No. 1:24-cv-01870 (E.D. Va., filed 2024-10-24), co-plaintiff Fantasia Trading, LLC d/b/a AnkerDirect; transferred to 2:24-cv-00881 (E.D. Tex.) and voluntarily dismissed 2024-12-05. That is the accused infringer (Anker group) seeking a non-infringement declaration — the opposite of an NPE asserting a purchased patent.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The entirety of the recorded chain is a single inventor-to-employer assignment to NEC Corporation (recorded 2019-03-01); there is no shell-LLC hop, no asserter, and no defensive-aggregator endpoint. NEC is a large, operating, publicly traded electronics/IT company that holds the patent and is enforcing it as plaintiff against a competitor's products (NEC Corp. v. Anker Innovations, 2:24-cv-00720, E.D. Tex.) — the hallmark of an operating-company assertion rather than an NPE campaign. The only "NPE-adjacent" litigation touching this patent is a DJ action filed against NEC.

Verify the underlying record at:

• https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search patent number 11210526)
• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68935278/ ... and RPX Empower for 1:24-cv-01870 / 2:24-cv-00720

(Caveat repeated for honesty: the reel/frame and correspondent fields above could not be confirmed from live Assignment Center data in this session — they are the one part of the requested reconstruction I could not complete, and I have not fabricated placeholders for them.)

I'll research US 11,210,526's citation record before analyzing prior art. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me pull the specific citation lists for this patent from multiple sources.

Let me look specifically at the granted US patent's own front-page citation list and examiner citations.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,210,526 B2

Scope note / access caveat up front: Per the operating rules I must flag this explicitly. My retrieval tools are web-search only — I could not open the USPTO Patent Public Search, Patent Center, or the IFW/Image File Wrapper for application 16/289,760 directly. I therefore could not read the granted patent's own "(56) References Cited" list off the front page, and my searches did not surface that front-page list for US 11,210,526. What follows is (a) what I did verify from citation records that are attached to this exact family/specification, (b) the one reference cited inside the patent's own text, and (c) a § 102 framework. Items I could not confirm are marked [UNVERIFIED]. I have not auto-corrected any identifier.

This section builds on the earlier claim-overview section (region-based claims 1–20) rather than repeating it.

1. What the citation record actually shows

1a. The reference the patent cites in its own specification (confirmed from the patent text)

The specification's CITATION LIST names exactly one prior-art document:

The patent characterizes it in the Background Art: "patent literature 1 discloses a technique of obviating the need for previous knowledge and prior learning of a behavior recognition system by real-time learning." Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11210526B2/en.

• [PARTIALLY VERIFIED] The Google Patents record for WO 2008098188A2 carries the title "Behavioral recognition system," and its citation/nplCitations graph links to EP 2473974 A4, "Behavioral Recognition Sys Inc." I flag the applicant name and exact title as unverified — I did not open the WO document itself.
• R1 predates the 2013-06-28 priority date by ~5 years, so it is facially available as § 102(a)(1)/102(b) printed-publication art if the claims are entitled to the 2013 priority date (see § 3).

1b. Family-level patent citations surfaced (3 of a stated 5)

On the Google Patents page for the family member JPWO2014208575A1 (the JP-language publication of PCT/JP2014/066777 — the same specification family), the record states "Patent Citations (5)" and lists these. These are the candidate examiner/applicant citations for this family's disclosure:

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/JPWO2014208575A1/en#7. The record states 5 citations but my result returned only these three; the remaining two could not be retrieved.

All three predate 2013-06-28 and are therefore facially available as § 102(b)-type printed publications against the 2013 priority date.

1c. References that are NOT prior art here (flagged to prevent conflation)

• US 10,275,657 B2 — the parent (US 14/899,191). Same family, same priority (2013-06-28), filed 2014-06-25. Not prior art to the '526; it is the parent.
• US 10,997,422 B2 and US 11,763,561 B2 (NEC, "Information processing apparatus…") appear in the family's citation graphs, but as "cited by" / later documents, not as art cited in the '526. They postdate it and are not § 102 art.
• US 11,729,347 / 12,323,730 / 12,542,864 / 12,563,154 / 12,574,469 / 12,549,678 and the pending US 2024/0348742 / US 2025/0324015 are the same-family continuations listed in the earlier summary — not separate prior art.
• Search hits such as WO 2020172395 A1, EP 4227306 A1, WO 2022233870 A1, US 11,445,261, US 11,256,706, etc. are unrelated technologies returned by keyword matching and are excluded.

2. § 102 anticipation analysis, reference by reference

Legal standard applied literally: anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102 requires that a single reference disclose every element of a claim, arranged as in the claim. Near-misses or "background" references do not anticipate; they may be § 103 art.

R1 — WO 2008/098188 (the patent's own cited art)

• What it discloses (as the patent itself describes it): machine-learning behavior recognition in which a behavior is characterized normal/abnormal "based on past observation of similar objects," and real-time learning that obviates prior knowledge/prior learning.
• Potentially anticipates: No claim of the '526 as granted. The patent expressly distinguishes it, and the distinction maps onto claim elements: the '526 claims require (i) a second region designated by an operator that is a part of the detected first region, and (ii) a new category having a name input by the operator. R1, as characterized by the patent, has no operator-driven region-of-interest sub-selection and no operator-named new category — the patent states "a system operator does not positively perform intervention and support, discriminator learning in the course of operation cannot be performed." Under § 102, missing those elements defeats anticipation of independent claims 1, 6, and 9.
• Realistic role: § 103/background art on the "detect an event belonging to a specific category" element, and on the general "learn from video during operation" concept. It could be combined with an operator-annotation reference, but combination is a § 103 theory, not § 102.

R2 — JPH0728766A (Toshiba, "Pattern recognition system and monitor system")

• Date check: published 1995-01-31 — prior art well before 2013-06-28. ✅
• Subject matter: pattern-recognition applied to a monitoring system (title-level only; I did not read the disclosure — [UNVERIFIED] at specification level).
• Potentially anticipates: No independent claim. A 1995 pattern-recognition/monitoring reference cannot disclose the operator-designated "second region within the first region" limited to a part of the object, the operator-entered new category name, or the "accumulate the second region's video as learning data" step (claims 1, 6, 9). Best-case relevance is as general background art to the "detecting… by analyzing the video" step of claim 1.

R3 — JP 2006-148442 A (Toshiba, "Mobile monitoring apparatus")

• Date check: published 2006-06-08. ✅ prior art.
• Subject matter: mobile/移动 monitoring apparatus (title-level only — [UNVERIFIED]).
• Potentially anticipates: No independent claim. Same reasoning as R2 — no teaching of operator-designated sub-regions of a detected object, no operator-typed new category, no region-specific learning-data accumulation. Possible § 103 background on surveillance-camera monitoring architecture.

R4 — JP 2008-250908 A (Toshiba, "Picture discriminating method and device")

• Date check: published 2008-10-16. ✅ prior art.
• Subject matter: image/video discrimination (classification) method and device (title-level only — [UNVERIFIED]).
• Potentially anticipates: No independent claim for the same reasons. Of the three JP references this is the closest thematically to "detecting a region corresponding to a category by analyzing the video" (claim 1's first step), so it is the most plausible § 103 companion reference — but it does not, on its face, supply the operator-named-new-category or the second-region-within-first-region limitations.

Bottom line on § 102

• On the record I could retrieve, no cited reference anticipates claims 1, 6, or 9, and none anticipates dependents 2–5, 7–8, 10–20. The two limitations that do the heavy lifting against every retrieved reference are:
  1. the "second region … being a part of the first region" operator designation (claims 1, 6, 9; UI aspects in 12–13/15–16/18–19), and
  2. the "new category … having a name input by the operator" (claims 1, 6, 9),
     plus the downstream "automatically detecting a third region corresponding to the new category" (claims 2/7/10) and the operator-point/incentive features (claims 3–5 / 8 / 11).
• Every retrieved citation (R1–R4) is at best § 103 background; none is a § 102 reference against the granted claim set.

3. The date question that governs all of the above — flag as a contradiction-adjacent risk

The § 102 analysis depends entirely on the effective filing date of the granted '526 claims, and there is a genuine issue here that the earlier section also flagged:

• The '526 issued 2021-12-28 with region-based independent claims (first region / operator-designated second region / operator-named new category). Its "Solution to Problem" text, however, recites the older component formulation ("video analyzer / display controller / learning data accumulator").
• Because 16/289,760 is a continuation filed 2019-03-01 of 14/899,191 (priority 2013-06-28), the region-based claims are entitled to the 2013-06-28 date only if the 2013 disclosure (the WO 2014/208575 / PCT specification, which is substantively the same description supplied here) provides written-description support for them. On its face the 2013 spec does describe a region designation graphic object 812 and category information name input field 811 (FIG. 8), which supports a 2013 priority argument.
• Consequence for prior art: if the region-based limitations are held not supported by the 2013 disclosure (a challenger argument, e.g., in the Anker § 101/§ 112 litigation), then those limitations would take the 2019-03-01 date, and a large volume of 2013–2019 machine-learning/annotation art (not in the retrieved citation record) would become available as § 102(a)(1) art. This is a legal conclusion I am not asserting — I am flagging it as the pivot on which the prior-art answer turns, and it should be resolved before relying on R1–R4 as the operative art set. Note this interacts with the E.D. Tex. ruling already summarized (claims held directed to the abstract idea of "labeling data regions to train a machine learning model," surviving Alice step two only on the assertion of unconventionality in the second-region-within-first-region / operator-named-category / accumulate features — i.e., exactly the features that no retrieved reference discloses).

4. What I could not determine — verify in the USPTO database directly

To complete this task to the standard requested, the following must be read from the authoritative USPTO record (which my tools did not reach):

1. The granted patent's front-page (56) "References Cited" list — both U.S. and Foreign Patent Documents, plus any Non-Patent Literature. This is the actual set of "patent citations for 11210526" the request asks about. [NOT RETRIEVED]
2. The Notice of References Cited (PTO-892) and any IDS in the file wrapper of 16/289,760 — these identify what the examiner actually applied versus what the applicant submitted. [NOT RETRIEVED]
3. The two missing entries of the "Patent Citations (5)" list on the family page (I retrieved only R2–R4). The remaining two could be additional JP or US references and should be pulled. [NOT RETRIEVED]
4. The § 102/§ 103 rejections during prosecution of both 16/289,760 and its parent 14/899,191 — these establish which references were actually treated as anticipatory art. [NOT RETRIEVED]
5. The full text of R1–R4 (I only have title-level and date-level data for the Toshiba references, and applicant-characterized content for WO 2008/098188). Anticipation conclusions above are necessarily provisional absent the actual disclosures. [UNVERIFIED at disclosure level]

Recommended authoritative sources: USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) and Patent Center for the IW of 16/289,760 / 14/899,191; the patent's own front page at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/56/8f/db/0f45ee8014cffe/US11210526.pdf.

Explicit honesty statement: I have not fabricated any citation. R1 is confirmed from the patent's own text. R2–R4 are confirmed as family-record citations with the dates shown, but I cannot currently confirm they appear on the US front page of 11,210,526, and I have not read their disclosures. No retrieved reference supports a § 102 anticipation of any granted claim of US 11,210,526 B2; the citations I could retrieve function, at most, as § 103/background art.

I'll ground the obviousness analysis in live prior-art sources before drafting. Let me run targeted searches.

Let me gather additional prior-art anchors and check for any post-grant challenges.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,210,526 B2 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Scope note. This is a technical prior-art analysis for patent-analyst purposes, not a legal opinion on validity or infringement. No claim construction has been obtained, and no PTAB or court has ruled on the merits of these references against the '526 claims. All prior-art dates below must be verified against the primary documents before any rejection is relied upon.

1. Effective filing date and governing law

The '526 claims priority to JP 2013-136953, filed June 28, 2013 — i.e., on/after the AIA's March 16, 2013 first-inventor-to-file date. The controlling statutes are therefore post-AIA §§ 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) and 103. The critical date for all prior art is June 28, 2013 (assuming the granted claims are entitled to the JP priority date; see §8 below for a caveat). Anything publicly available before that date is § 102(a)(1) art and can be combined under § 103.

Flagged inconsistency (per the cross-reference instruction): the task header states the current date as April 26, 2026, while the system date is September 30, 2026, and the previously generated section describes a June 3–4, 2026 E.D. Tex. eligibility ruling in NEC v. Anker, 2:24-cv-00720. Those cannot all be correct. The prior-art analysis below is unaffected, but the litigation chronology should be re-verified against PACER.

On the "Prior Art" section of the Google Patents page. That page's prior-art listing is sparse: it supplies only the auto-generated keyword set — video, operator, region, learning, category — the assumed prior-art date (2013-06-28), and the single cited reference Patent literature 1: WO 2008/098188. Notably, those five keywords map one-to-one onto the elements of granted claim 1 (video = "analyzing the at least one video"; operator = "designated by an operator"; region = "first region"/"second region"; learning = "learning data"; category = "predetermined category"/"new category"). I treat WO 2008/098188 as the anchor reference the patent itself identifies, and supplement it with independently located art from live searches.

2. Prior art relied upon

3. Claim 1 — element-by-element mapping (primary combination: A + B, motivated by C)

Result: no single reference contains all elements (so § 102 anticipation is not available), but every element is taught, and the combination is a textbook § 103 case.

4. Motivation to combine (KSR rationales)

1. Same field of endeavor / analogous art. A, C, D, E and F are all machine-learning for video/image object detection and annotation; B is the canonical interactive labelling tool for training object detectors, expressly cited as such throughout the vision literature. The Federal Circuit's Recentive Analytics framing — which the E.D. Tex. court applied to these very claims — characterizes the subject matter as "labelling data regions to train a machine learning model"; that characterization is the shared field of all six references.

2. A known technique solving a known problem. Both A and C frame the problem the '526 identifies: A states that surveillance systems "require advance knowledge … of the actions and/or objects the systems have to be able to seek out" and are "labor intensive and prohibitively costly"; the '526's own Background says default modules "require enormous man-hours and a long period for collection and correct answering." B and C supply the known remedy: have the human in the loop label/name what the detector missed, and retrain on it. This is a "use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way" (KSR rational (C)).

3. Reasonable expectation of success. C and D had already demonstrated the exact closed loop — detect → human annotates a region → accumulate → retrain → re-detect — with measured improvement, and C demonstrated it on a surveillance dataset. A skilled artisan would expect the same benefit when the annotation step is enriched with B's free-text category-naming (which is what lets the retrained module detect a new class rather than merely correct an old one).

4. Design incentive / market force. The '526 Background concedes that "as the types of crimes and accidents diversify, demands from operation customers to addition processing for detectable events are growing." A expressly notes the high cost of pre-coding every detectable behavior. Adding an operator-facing naming step to the existing surveillance annotation UI is a predictable engineering response to that demand.

5. Simple substitution, no change in principle. Substituting B's free-text category-naming dialog for the "unknown"/"other" class label already present in A's classifier is the substitution of one known element for another to obtain a predictable result (KSR rational (B)).

Representative articulation: Claim 1 is obvious over WO 2008/098188 in view of LabelMe (Russell et al. 2008), and further in view of Yao et al. (CVPR 2012).

5. Reinforcing / alternative combinations

• Combination 2 (independent primary): Yao (C) + Vijayanarasimhan (D) + LabelMe (B) + US 2004/0205482 (E). C supplies on-the-fly detection and the operator-corrected region; D supplies the accumulate-and-retrain loop; B supplies operator-named new categories; E supplies the region-on-video-frame display and editing UI plus active selection. Motivation: C and D are literally the same research program (interactive/live annotation for detector training) and D cites the "region labeling" active-learning line — a strong, explicit combining cue in the references themselves.
• Combination 3 (for claims 3–5 only): LabelMe (B) + the ESP-game incentive model referenced in B (von Ahn & Dabbish, 2004) + Vijayanarasimhan & Grauman, "What's It Going to Cost You?" (CVPR 2009, pp. 2262–2269) for weighting annotation value. B already discloses the two metrics claimed — number of annotations per user (Fig. 4(a)) and number of unique/new object descriptions (Fig. 2(c)) — and the recordal of an operator identifier ("Users may get credit for the objects that they label by entering a username").
• Combination 4: US 8,280,153 (F) + B + C — F supplies the operator-feedback-to-modify-system-behaviour loop in a video-surveillance context.

6. Dependent claims

Given claim 1 is the narrowest independent claim, a full rejection of claims 1–20 is supportable on the above combinations, with claims 3–5 and 12–20 requiring the secondary references.

7. Anticipation considered and rejected

No single reference discloses all four steps. B (LabelMe) comes closest — operator draws a region and types a free-text name that becomes training data, with part-of-object labeling and operator credit — but B does not disclose automatically analyzing a video to detect a first region corresponding to a predetermined category and then receiving the operator's sub-region within that detected region. A (WO '188) discloses automatic detection with predetermined classes and real-time learning, but not operator-named new categories. A + B is therefore a § 103, not § 102, combination. (E also fails alone for the same reason as B.)

8. Counterarguments and weaknesses to anticipate

1. Support/claim-construction mismatch (flagged cross-reference). In the '526 specification, when the operator selects "other," the supervisor — not the operator — inputs the new category name at step S907 via terminal 570, and the supervisor sets the region via the "region designation graphic object 812" of FIG. 8. Granted claim 1 requires a name "input by the operator" and a second region "designated by an operator." Under a construction that treats "operator" and "supervisor" as distinct roles, NEC may narrow the claim to the operator role. That narrowing does not defeat the combinations above, because LabelMe's labeler is unambiguously the operator equivalent; but it may shift which reference is the best primary. A separate § 112(a) written-description question also exists and is outside this analysis.

2. "Part of the object and part of the first region." NEC will argue this conjunctive narrowing is the inventive core (it is the limitation that carried claim 1 through Alice step two at the pleadings stage in NEC v. Anker). Counter with A's express "several rectangles … encompass[ing] different regions of the human, such as arms, legs, head, and torso" inside the object's bounding rectangle, and B's head/face-vs-body discussion. This is the strongest rebuttal point available to the patentee and should be addressed head-on.

3. Teaching away / different purpose. NEC may argue A's learning is unsupervised normal-vs-abnormal learning, not supervised category training, and that B is a web crowdsourcing tool with no surveillance/real-time component. Counter: A's classifier 505 uses predetermined classes; C applies interactive annotation expressly to surveillance; and the KSR "familiar element"/"predictable result" rationales do not require the references to share a purpose.

4. Secondary considerations. Watch for evidence of unexpected results, industry praise, copying, or licensing. The pending litigation (E.D. Tex. 2:24-cv-00881; 2:24-cv-00720) may generate secondary-considerations evidence. Note that a nexus to the claimed "second-region-within-first-region + operator-named new category" combination — not merely to operator-assisted learning generally — must be shown, because the general concept is squarely in the art.

5. Date-vulnerable references. Cite only material published before 2013-06-28: use the CVPR 2011 version of Vijayanarasimhan (not IJCV 2014), and verify US 10,140,508's effective filing date before relying on it at all.

9. Bottom line

• Strongest § 103 position: claim 1 (and claims 6 and 9, which recite the same four steps in method and CRM form) is obvious over WO 2008/098188 (A) in view of LabelMe/Russell et al. 2008 (B), with Yao et al., CVPR 2012 (C) supplying the explicit motivation to run operator annotation inside a live, surveillance-oriented detector-training loop.
• Claims 2–5 and 12–20 fall with the addition of Vijayanarasimhan & Grauman CVPR 2011 (D), US 2004/0205482 A1 (E), and US 8,280,153 (F).
• Principal risk to the rejection: the patentee's argument that the specific "part-of-object sub-region within the detected first region" plus operator-coined category name is a non-obvious combination. The best answer is A's part-rectangle teaching combined with B's part-scoped free-text labeling, reinforced by the demand-side motivation recited in the '526's own Background.

Confidence: high on the bibliographic and disclosure content of A, B, C, and E (drawn from the documents themselves); medium on the precise claim-construction scope of "operator"/"second region"; low on the date-qualification of US 10,140,508, which should not be used until verified.