Appeal No. 1998-1902
Application No. 08/435,592
Claims 13-16 have been canceled, and claims 17-20 have been allowed.
We refer to the Final Rejection (Paper No. 6) and the Examiner's Answer (Paper
No. 9) for a statement of the examiner's position and to the Brief (Paper No. 8) and the
Reply Brief (Paper No. 10) for appellants’ position with respect to the claims which stand
rejected.
OPINION
According to the statement of the rejection with regard to claims 1 and 2, Barton is
relied upon as disclosing a method similar to instant claim 1. (See Answer, page 4.)
However, the reference “does not specifically show...a diffusion filter having weights 8 - 0 -
4 - 4 expressed clockwise from the origin.” (Id.)
The examiner submits that the use of a filter which has a weight expressed
as 8 - 0 - 4 - 4, is not critical to the invention and thus, would have been
obvious as a matter of design choice. The prior art shows different
weighting arrangements with respect to the Floyd and Steinberg methods.
One of ordinary skill in the art would have known to substitute one type of
weighted filter in place of another for the purpose of obtaining a desired
error diffusion result.
(Id. at 4-5.)
Appellants’ specification (at page 7) discusses Barton, the reference applied
against claims 1 and 2. Appellants describe Barton’s error diffusion filter as a “3-weight
filter.” As shown in Barton’s Figures 5A and 5B, and described principally at lines 40-52 of
column 7, Barton reduces error diffusion processing time “by nearly 25 percent.” Barton
-3-
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