Appeal No. 96-0650
Application No. 08/117,591
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary
skill in the art to perform thinning, as taught by
Hardy et al, on a detected marked region in the
system of Matsunawa et al, in order to more
accurately delineate a region enclosed by a marking
line or a marking image, in order to facilitate
subsequent processing of pixels in the delineated
region, particularly in view of the teaching of
Hardy et al that such processing may make a zone of
interest more easily recognizable.
Appellant argues (Brief, page 6) that Hardy stores the
“entire image prior to thinning because the data must be
analyzed in a left to right direction, in a right to left
direction, in an up to down direction, and in a down to up
direction.”
Hardy discloses that during the thinning process an image
memory 28 (Figure 4) has image data stored therein, and that
“the image memory will have 512 by 512 pixels (i.e., storage
locations corresponding to pixels),” and that “[t]he image
data will be scanned in four different directions” (column 7,
lines 5 through 14). Figure 1 of Hardy illustrates the
scanning of the data in the four directions. Such four-
directional scanning can only be performed on data that has
been previously stored in memory.
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