Appeal No. 1998-0671
Application 08/285,328
The examiner's answer relies on the admitted prior art (APA2)
shown in Appellants' figure 1 and the following prior art:
Eschbach 5,258,854 November 2, 1993
J.C. Stoffel and J.F. Moreland, A Survey of Electronic
Techniques for Pictorial Reproduction, IEEE Trans. on Comm.,
Vol. COM-29, No. 12, Dec. 1981, pp. 1898-1925 (hereinafter
"Survey").3
Since the Survey article was not mentioned in any rejection prior to
the examiner's answer, it technically raises a new ground of
rejection. Nevertheless, we consider the Survey article as applied
by the Examiner.
The APA of Appellants' figure 1 discloses screening. A screen
value, normalized to the threshold, is added to the image signal at
the modulator of element 1 to produce a screened multi-level gray
scale value, followed by thresholding the multi-level gray scale
value against a fixed threshold in the comparator of element 3 to
reduce the number of number of gray scale levels. The portion of the
Survey article relied upon by the Examiner, page 295 and figure 15,
2 The APA relied upon by the Examiner should be listed in the
prior art of record section of the examiner's answer.
3 Since the Survey article is mentioned in the rejection
(examiner's answer, p. 8), it should be listed in the prior art of
record section of the examiner's answer.
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