Appeal No. 1998-0875
Application No. 08/210,529
Ejiri 1 62-274962 Nov. 28,
1987
(Published Japanese Kokai Patent Application)
Welsh WO 94/00951 Jan. 6, 1994
(Published PCT International Patent Application)
Claims 1, 3 through 11, 13 through 16, 19 and 24 through
26 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Welsh and Ejiri.
Reference is made to the brief (paper number 13) and the
answer (paper number 14) for the respective positions of the
appellant and the examiner.
OPINION
The obviousness rejection of claims 1, 3 through 11, 13
through 16, 19 and 24 through 26 is reversed.
Welsh recognizes that a 10 frame/second transmission rate
of an image transmitter (Figure 1) leads to a loss of
synchronization between a speaker’s lips and the transmitted
speech (page 2). By extracting and encoding lip movement via
feature extractor 106 and encoder 110, respectively, at a
higher frame/second rate than the remainder of the image
encoded by encoder 102, the speaker’s lips can be placed in
1A copy of the translation for this reference is attached.
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