Ex parte TAKEBAYASHI et al. - Page 1




                                  THIS OPINION WAS NOT WRITTEN FOR PUBLICATION                                                         

                       The opinion in support of the decision being entered today (1) was not written for                              
                       publication in a law journal and (2) is not binding precedent of the Board.                                     

                                                                                               Paper No. 59                            

                                    UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE                                                          
                                                             ____________                                                              

                                          BEFORE THE BOARD OF PATENT APPEALS                                                           
                                                       AND INTERFERENCES                                                               
                                                             ____________                                                              

                                                 Ex parte YOICHI TAKEBAYASHI,                                                          
                                                    HIROSHI KANAZAWA, AND                                                              
                                                       HIROYUKI CHIMOTO                                                                
                                                             ____________                                                              

                                                        Appeal No. 1997-4121                                                           
                                                      Application No. 08/427,272                                                       
                                                             ____________                                                              

                                                       HEARD:  March 7, 2000                                                           
                                                             ____________                                                              



                       This is a decision on appeal from the final rejection of claims 1 through 15, all of the claims pending         

               in the application.                                                                                                     

                       The invention pertains to time series signal recognition in general and to speech recognition in                

               particular.  Highly accurate recognition tests in quiet environments have been known but the recognition                

               rate is drastically reduced in noisy environments due to false pattern matching or failure of appropriate               

               word boundary detection.  While word spotting, or continuous pattern matching, has been used to alleviate               

               the problem, other problems have arisen.  As depicted in prior art Figure 1, the word boundary for a                    

               particular signal gets narrower as the noise level increases.  But, the speech recognition dictionary                   






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