Appeal No. 1999-0034
Application No. 08/568,402
opinion. Instant claim 10 is drafted in an open-ended form that does not exclude
acquisition of potential target data by separate sensors and moving a camera into
position for monitoring a particular area of interest prior to the claimed steps of
monitoring, processing, and controlling.
Appellant again argues a point not in dispute, on page 3 of the request, by
arguing that McGary fails to teach monitoring the area by means of a pilot camera
thereby producing an image of the area which is then processed and used to control a
slave camera. As we pointed out on page 5 of the opinion, the rejection relies on the
Paff reference, not the McGary reference, for the teaching of a slave camera. The
rejection offers the teachings of McGary combined with those of Paff, with the result
that Paff’s master camera no longer requires a human operator to move the master
camera about the area under surveillance.
To the extent that appellant may hold that Paff’s control of slave cameras is not
based on a signal representative of the location of an object of interest, we note that
appellant has not shown error in the examiner’s finding that the references would have
suggested implementing the automatic target tracking taught by McGary to the slave
camera control as taught by Paff. We also note that even if one were to maintain Paff’s
system for broadcasting the pan and tilt position of the master camera to the slave
cameras, rather than broadcasting position signals directly derived from processing of
the image of the area under surveillance, the slave cameras would track the object
based on a signal representative of the location of the object as required by instant
-3-
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007