Appeal No. 1996-0485 Page 8
Application No. 08/139,456
The appellant’s specification includes the following
statements to which the examiner’s rejection refers.
A well known technique to reduce the effects of
quantization is to add noise to the signal before
quantizing. This technique is also known as
dithering. This tends to make the transition from
one step to the next less uniform and therefore less
apparent to a viewer.
This approach to dithering has not typically
been applied to image quantization. In certain
experimental systems, noise has been added to the
RGB components before quantization. However, when
enough noise is added to reduce the banding effect,
the resulting color values often have significantly
different spectral content and the resulting image
has unacceptable color speckling. (Spec. at 3.)
In short, the appellant admits that it was known to dither
image data, which are in the RGB format, before quantizing the
data.
He does not admit, however, that it was known to dither
image data, which is in the YUV format, before quantizing the
data as claimed. He does not even admit that it was known to
dither data at any point in a conversion of data from the YUV
format to the RGB format. The examiner erred by misconstruing
the scope of the admission. Neither the addition of Deacon,
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