Appeal No. 1998-0671
Application 08/285,328
1990). Accordingly, care should be taken in expressing the rejection
in the final rejection.
In the examiner's answer, the Examiner finds that "Eschbach
does not explicitly disclose 'generating a screened multi-level grey
scale pixel value'" (EA7), but finds that screening before
thresholding was well known in the art as shown in the APA of
Appellants' figure 1 and the Survey article. The Examiner concludes
that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art
for Eschbach to screen the pixel in view of the APA and the Survey
article "because adding a screening function prior to thresholding is
the common practice in image processing for generating an intensity
modulating the image, so the image can be detected" (EA8). In
response to Appellants' argument that the Examiner's final rejection
proposed to substitute screening for thresholding, the Examiner
states (EA12):
In reply, the Examiner is not substituting the screening for
thresholding, which is reducing the number of levels. The
screening is substituted before the reduction of levels. This
is exactly what the applicant's admitted prior art is
illustrating in figure 1. The screening is preformed [sic] is
step 1 and is followed by the reduction of levels in step[] 3
(see figure 1).
In the examiner's answer, it becomes clear that the Examiner
uses the term "screening" to refer to adding a screen value and a
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