Appeal No. 2002-1458
Application 08/785,109
background, determining boundaries of the plurality of objects
. . .”, as recited in Appellant’s claims 1 and 13. See pages 7
through 10 of the Appellant’s brief. Also see Appellant’s reply
brief, pages 1 through 5.
The Examiner responds to Appellant’s arguments by stating
Aono certainly discloses that a user performs editing
functions to the image (column 10, lines 39-60), this is done
AFTER the extracted processing section (4) performs a process of
separating the background image and the object image so as to
form region information (column 9, lines 50-62), this process is
done based on a display program (column 7, lines 2-19). The
extracted processing part separates the object image from the
background (column 10, lines 13-25), which clearly reads on using
preprogrammed instructions to determine the background of the
digitized image. The user edits the image AFTER the background
has been determined by the extracted processing part, and uses
the region information generated from the extraction process to
edit the image, since “human eyes generally have high spatial
resolution, and hence are highly sensitive to any offset to lines
and planes, i.e. to edges” (column 10, lines 39-51).
See pages 12 and 13 of the Examiner’s answer.
Upon our review of Aono, we find that Aono teaches in
section 3 a Method of Compressing Full-Color Pictorial Parts.
This is found in column 9, line 44, through column 15, line 34.
Aono discloses that this method is a method for compressing and
coding only a selected partial region of a full-color image. See
column 9, lines 45 through 46. Referring to figure 12, Aono
teaches that image data 1, 2, such as an original, picture or a
photograph to be processed, are stored in the image data base 32
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