Appeal No. 96-0113
Application 07/848,779
obviousness rejection see the protest obfuscates and muddles the
reasons underlying the obviousness conclusion. Note also that
while the examiner's position as stated in his answer at the
bottom of page 6 appears to be that the teaching in Sullivan '517
of the use of a supercomputer suggests simultaneous generation of
bit patterns, the protest (pages 8 and 9) relies instead on
Parker for suggesting that feature. That inconsistency further
renders unclear as to what exactly is the examiner's position.
We now focus on the few findings and conclusions the
examiner did make. All of the claims on appeal require the
generation of a set of correlated two-dimensional binary patterns
with each pattern corresponding to one density level of a digital
input. All claims except claim 17 further specify that the
patterns are simultaneously generated by minimizing an ensemble
cost function. Claims 1 and 11, and the claims dependent
thereon, further require that the ensemble cost function is the
variance of non-zero spatial frequencies weighted by a human
visual system modulation transfer function.
The examiner stated (final rejection at 3): "Although Daly,
or Sullivan et al [Sullivan '517] and Parker et al do not recite
the set of patterns being generated simultaneously, the program
shows in Sullivan et al '517 indicating that the patterns can be
-18-
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