Appeal No. 1998-2989
Application No. 08/566,987
Appellant argues that the examiner’s statement for the modification to Bhargava with
respect to its application to binary image data is merely a conclusory statement and is not
taught or suggested by Bhargava. We agree with appellant that Bhargava does not
explicitly teach its application to binary image data, but, as noted above, we agree with the
examiner that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the
invention to extend the teachings of Bhargava to binary image data. Therefore, this
argument is not persuasive, and we will sustain the rejection of independent claim 1 and its
dependent claims 2, 3, 5-7 and 12.
With respect to claims 13, 14, and 21, appellant argues that the claims recite a lossless
data compressor. As discussed above, with the application of the methodology of
Bhargava to binary image data there would have been only two states for segmenting the
larger image region and no averaging of data. Therefore, this precompression would have
been a lossless process. Further, Bhargava discloses the encoding of the state and size
of each region. In the background of Bhargava, it is disclosed that a two-step process is
generally employed in which the compressed array of total information is further encoded
into a compressed stream for transmission. (See Bhargava at col. 1, lines 40-50.)
Bhargava further discloses that the compressed data is provided to an encode and
transmit mechanism 50 (see Bhargava at columns 7-8) and also discloses the use of a
Huffman encoder 120 in Fig. 12. The use of a Huffman encoder was a well known device
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