Appeal No. 1998-0752
Application 08/389,096
invention, the method includes scanning a document having such
characters to generate a waveform having a time varying
amplitude (specification, page 15, lines 6-15); sampling the
waveform at a predetermined number of positions (page 15,
lines 21-28); normalizing the samples by dividing each sample
by the computed average magnitude of all samples (page 16,
lines 18-23); determining the difference in amplitude between
each normalized sample and the previous normalized sample to
generate a set of "ratio difference values" (page 17, lines 5-
12); and comparing that set of ratio difference values to
stored sets of ratio difference values, the closest match
being selected as the recognized character (page 17, lines 12-
16). In another embodiment of the invention, the method uses
the numerical difference between normalized samples to
generate a set of identifiers that determine whether the
waveform has a rising slope, falling slope, or no change in
slope from one sample to the next, the set of identifiers
being compared with stored sets of identifiers in order to
make a character recognition decision (page 18, lines 11-28).
Independent claims 1 and 9 are reproduced as follows:
2
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