Appeal No. 2002-1657
Application No. 09/134,981
in the Examiner’s position (Answer, page 6) that the black and
white images in Futamura are color types, at least in the manner
broadly claimed by Appellant. We would point out that, although
Appellant emphasizes in the arguments (Brief, at 10) that “color”
refers to colors of a spectrum, there is no such language in the
appealed claims.
We find to be equally without merit Appellant’s further
assertion (Brief, page 11) that Futamura lacks a disclosure of any
interrelating of skeletal and edge contour data as recited in claim
1. In Appellant’s view (Reply Brief, pages 2 and 3), no such
interrelating can take place in Futamura since there is no
depiction of skeletal data of any kind.
Our review of the description of the Figures 5 and 6
illustrations in Futamura referenced by the Examiner reveals,
however, that the inner and outer edge contours (Figure 5) are
processed by removing pixels between the inner and outer
peripheries to produce a thinned or “skeletonized” contour (Figure
6).2 We fail to see why this inner and outer periphery data
processing to produce a resulting skeletal image would not
2 Enclosed with this decision is a copy of pages 491-494 from Digital
Image Processing by Rafael Gonzalez and Richard E. Woods (Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, 1992) which describes an example of a thinning or
“skeletonizing” algorithm.
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