Appeal No. 1998-0643
Application 08/196,028
We find Bloomberg meets step (a) of claim 1, where the
first image is the highlighted portion 110 of figure 14A and
figure 14B is the second image. All words within the
highlighted portion 110 are connected together by the OPEN
operation. Step (a) of claim 1 is directed to "blobifying"
word objects, which is shown by figure 14B, and says nothing
about isolating the word objects. However, we find Bloomberg
does not disclose steps (b), (c), or (d) of claim 1 because
Bloomberg is directed to identifying a highlighted region (HR)
by creating an HR mask of ON pixels, as shown in figure 14C,
not to identifying word objects. That is, the image
containing connected symbols in figure 14B is filled in by a
CLOSE step to produce the HR mask of figure 14C and is not
used to isolate word objects. The Examiner's rejection relies
on Tanaka for teaching the boundary and word object
limitations.
Appellants argue that Tanaka is directed to determining
the coordinates of a circumscribed rectangular frame for
enclosing each character, not word, and there must not be any
interconnection between adjacent characters or the Tanaka
method will fail to accomplish its stated purpose (Br18). It
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