Appeal No. 1998-1387 Page 12
Application No. 08/208,791
The prior art would have suggested these limitations. As
mentioned regarding the combination of references, Haruki
teaches performing an automatic exposure adjustment operation
after performing an automatic focusing operation. Because
exposure is adjusted only after focusing, exposure is adjusted
ipso facto only on a subject who is in-focus. In addition, a
person being focused-on, see fig. 12, would have skin-colored
hues.
Imai further teaches performing its automatic exposure
adjustment operation on a skin-colored subject. The
appellants make the following admission.
The `482 reference teaches an image pick-up
apparatus having exposure control for human subjects
... and, based on the evaluation of the incident
light with respect to known values of skin colored
hues, a determination is made as to the presence of
skin colored objects within the incident light. The
feature which is relied upon by the Examiner is
circuits 208-211, which are used to extract a skin
color if available from an input. If a skin color
is detected, the apparatus controls the exposure to
produce the optimal exposure for the skin colored
object .... (Appeal Br. at 7.)
The reference adds, “[a]s a result of the thus-obtained
exposing mechanism controlling method, the most suitable
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