Appeal No. 2002-2041
Application No. 09/764,658
picture sequence. The examiner points to Legall’s teaching of
the starting of a new group of pictures (GOP), e.g., at column
11, lines 15 et seq., as an indication that a picture
rearrangement has taken place.
However, even if the start of a new GOP may be considered
as a rearrangement of the order of a picture sequence, the
instant claims do not require this rearrangement in a vacuum.
Rather, the picture rearrangement step or operation must take
place “between the analysis and prediction steps of one
iteration” (claim 1) or “between the coding operation and the
prediction operation” (claim 9).
The examiner points us to Figure 8 of Legall, wherein step
200 is said to correspond to the claimed “analysis” step, steps
202-212 are said to correspond to the claimed “prediction step”
and step 214 is said to correspond to the claimed “final control
step.” The examiner’s analysis is erroneous in only one aspect.
That is, there is no picture rearrangement step shown or
disclosed by Legall between the analysis and prediction steps.
As depicted in instant Figure 4, while the analysis, prediction
and final pass steps may be conventional, appellants’
contribution is to include the picture rearrangement step 42,
comprised of various substeps, between the analysis and
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