Appeal No. 1998-2989
Application No. 08/566,987
With respect to claim 8, the examiner relies upon the combination of Bhargava and
Ghosh to teach the use of the most significant bit as the state bit. The examiner relies
upon the teachings of Ghosh with respect to the use of the MSB to store the state of the
grouping of pixels. We agree with the examiner that in a binary image, there would have
been a single bit to represent the state of the grouping of pixels. Appellant argues that
Ghosh teaches away from the use of a single bit because it teaches the use of gray scale
value after the bit indicating the sameness of the grouping. (See brief at page 19.) We
disagree with appellant. Therefore, this argument is not persuasive, and we will sustain the
rejection of claim 8.
With respect to claim 9, appellant argues that the combination of Bhargava and Cornyn
does not teach or suggest the claimed steps of moving diagonally and backing up
diagonally. (See brief at page 19.) We agree with appellant. The examiner admits that
Bhargava does not teach this step of identifying the orthogonal region. The examiner
relies upon the teachings of Cornyn and cites to columns 13 and 14. We disagree with the
examiner. Cornyn merely teaches the comparison of prior adjacent pixels to a current
pixel. The immediate left and immediate above pixels are used. Therefore, we disagree
with the examiner that Cornyn suggests the use of diagonal movement, and we will not
sustain the rejection of claim 9.
8
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