Appeal No. 1998-1905
Application No. 08/362,725
The rejection is also deficient in apparently stopping at the requirements of instant
claim 1. Independent claims 3 and 9 set forth additional embodiments of the invention,
which are not addressed in the statement of the rejection. Claim 9 is mentioned in the
answer in the paragraph bridging pages 7 and 8. However, there is no application of the
teachings of the references to the specific requirements of the claim.
We therefore cannot sustain the rejection of claims 1-13 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as
being unpatentable over Dillon and Rantasuo. We add that, in our view, Rantasuo appears
to be the more pertinent of the references, at least with respect to instant claim 1.
2
Rantasuo discloses an infrared digital electronic camera comprising a solid state color
image sensor 2 (Figure 3) having an array of image sensing elements and an array of
color filter elements 7, 15 arranged over the image sensing elements for producing a color
image signal. Color filter elements 7, 15, include an infrared color filter element 15 that
blocks blue light and passes infrared light. Decoder 18 is a signal processing circuit for
processing a color image signal from image sensor 2 to produce a false color image
signal. Appellants contend that “the only processing that is done by Rantasuo...is to
change the order of the signals in the output channels.” (Brief, page 5.) While we agree
with appellants that such processing is not suitable for use in the Dillon system, changing
2Although Rantasuo describes selectively blocking or passing “near infrared” radiation, appellants
do not draw any distinction between the “near infrared” and the “infrared light” set forth in the claims. See
Brief, page 5 (“Since the filter structure disclosed by Rantasuo...separates the light reaching the respective
sensor arrays into infrared, green and red....”).
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