Appeal No. 1998-0643
Application 08/196,028
No. 12, p. 3). The Examiner finds that Tanaka teaches
locating connected strings and identifying boundaries about
each connected word string (Paper No. 12, p. 3). The Examiner
concludes (Paper No. 12, p. 3): "It would have been obvious
to one of ordinary skill in the art to combine the teachings
of Bloomberg and Tanaka in order to isolate a word in an image
because Bloomberg teaches a technique to connect all
characters of a word to form a connected string, and Tanaka
teaches locating connected strings by identifying their
boundaries."
Appellants argue that the purpose of the "opening"
process step in figure 14B of Bloomberg is to remove noise as
well as the outlines of non-highlighted characters as one step
in a continuum of steps to identify regions of an image that
were highlighted using a conventional color highlight pen and
is not directed to isolating words objects (Br16-18).
The Examiner responds that once the highlighted region
has been determined, the "opening" step effectively isolates
word objects in question and it is of no moment that the step
is part of a continuum of steps (EA3-4).
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