Appeal No. 1998-0671
Application 08/285,328
Claims 1 and 7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over the Survey article, Eschbach et al.
(Eschbach '653), U.S. Patent 5,317,653, issued May 31, 1994,
effective filing date September 5, 1991, (incorporated by reference
into the specification at p. 3), and the admitted prior art (APA) at
figure 1 and pages 2-3 of the specification (which appears to be
discussing Eschbach '653).
The Survey article describes an electronic screening process
for converting a continuous tone image to binary gray scale pixel
values. With respect to claim 1, referring to figure 15(a) of the
Survey article, the pixel input to the adder performs the step of
"(a) receiving the multi-level grey scale pixel value of a first
resolution"; the adder performs the step of "(b) generating a
screened multi-level grey scale pixel value"; and the fixed threshold
comparator performs the step of "(c) reducing the number of levels in
the screened multi-level grey scale pixel value." The APA of
Appellants' figure 1 also shows the same limitations.
It was known that "screening can take place in one of two
different ways; [1] the way illustrated in Figure 1 where a screen
value, normalized to the threshold, is added to the image signal
before thresholding and then thresholded, or [2] in a process where
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