Appeal No. 1997-0014
Application No. 08/192,937
Reference is made to the briefs and the answers for the
respective positions of the appellants and the examiner.
OPINION
The obviousness rejection of claims 3, 5, 7, 8, 25
through 29, 42, 44 and 46 is reversed because the applied
references neither teach nor would have suggested to the
skilled artisan the initiation of a series of processing steps
on scanned lines of pixels from a document scanner before the
last line of pixels is derived from scanning the document.
The examiner is of the opinion (Supplemental Answer,
paper number 24, page 5) that:
With respect to the limitation that the image
processing (thresholding and compressing) steps take
place “before the last line of pixels is derived
from said scanning said document,” the Examiner
notes that D’Aoust ‘100 at least suggests this
feature since the memory (50) used to store image
information can hold only four columns of image data
(see column 5) and therefore could not contain the
entire document image at one time . . . . Given
D’Aoust’s basic parallel processing system, it would
have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the
art to begin the image processing steps before
scanning the entire document in order to reduce the
need for large, expensive memories and in order to
provide the fastest and most efficient possible
system. Clearly, the goal of any parallel pipeline-
based system such as D’Aoust discloses is to perform
operations concurrently rather than sequentially so
that maximum efficiency can be achieved.
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