Appeal No. 2004-0557
Application No. 08/829,187
appellants and the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we
will reverse the anticipation rejection of claims 1 through 6,
and 17, and we will reverse the obviousness rejection of claim 7.
Claims 1 through 6 and 17
Claims 1 through 6 and 17 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 102(b) as being anticipated by Amano. Appellants argue (Brief,
pages 7-8) that the noise reduction system 18 of Amano does not
reduce the random noise in the image signals as does the claimed
(see independent Claim 1) noise reduction system, namely, by
"combining a non-noise-reduced image signal previously stored in
said frame memory ... with a non-noise-reduced current image
signal ... to form a noise-reduced image signal." Additionally,
appellants argue (Brief, pages 9-11) that in the Amano system the
two signals that are combined by the adder 25 are already noise-
reduced because the signal that was previously stored in the
frame 27 is multiplied by a coefficient K in multiplier 26, and
the current signal is multiplied by a coefficient (1-K) in
multiplier 24 before the two signals arrive in adder 25. Since
the noise reduction is done at the multipliers 24 and 26, the two
signals are thus noise-reduced by these coefficients before the
two signal combination occurs in adder 25.
The examiner counters (Answer, pages 5-6) by stating that
Amano teaches that the coefficient K can have values including
4
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