Appeal No. 2004-0042
Application 09/368,380
that the examiner has failed to establish a prima facie case of
obviousness of the rejected subject matter of these claims. The
examiner has merely presumptively, and in hindsight it appears,
argued the combinability of O’Rourke in Tekalp “in order to
obtain the current invention” as set forth at page 6 of the
Answer. Appellants are correct at page 9 of the Brief that the
examiner has failed to identify any cogent motivation for the
proposed combination. The examiner has set forth essentially an
unexplained conclusion that it would have been obvious to the
artisan to apply the concept of Markov Random Fields to Tekalp’s
invention.
Even though we reverse the rejection of the identified
claims in the third stated rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103, we
observe in passing that the teaching value of O’Rourke alone
clearly applies to the MRF recitations of dependent claim 4
and the MAP recitation of dependent claim 8. The examiner has
never set forth a rejection of corresponding independent claims 1
and 11 on appeal on the basis of O’Rourke alone, although we
believe there is ample basis among the teachings of the reference
to have done so. Likewise, the examiner has not asserted the
11
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