Appeal No. 2004-0659
Application No. 09/111,978
B. FINDINGS OF FACT
The following findings of fact are believed to be supported by a preponderance of
the evidence.
THE INVENTION
1. The invention relates to the non-invasive three-dimensional
measurement of surface contours using technology such as moiré technology with a novel
approach that allows continuous scanning of a surface (U.S. Patent 5,646,733, at Col. 3,
lines 24-27).
2. The invention can be understood by reference to Figures 1 and 2 of
the drawings, which are reproduced in Appendix 1 of this opinion.
3. FIG. 1 is a schematic view of a machine vision system 10
including an optical head 12 for carrying out the method and system of the present
invention (Col. 2, lines 65-67).
4. FIG. 2 is a schematic view illustrating the details of a first
embodiment of the optical head 12 of FIG. 1 (Col. 3, lines 1-2).
5. The system 10 provides high speed, scanning phase measuring of
an object 14 at a vision station 16 to develop dimensional information such as height
information of a surface 18 of the object 14 (Col. 3, lines 17-21).
6. The object 14 moves relative to the optical head 12 as indicated by
arrow 20 (Col. 3, lines 21-23).
7. The system 10 also includes a system bus 26, which receives
information from an image digitizer/frame grabber 22 and passes the information on to an
IBM compatible host computer such as a Pentium PC 28 (Col. 3, lines 40-43).
8. The frame grabber 22 places each input image into a frame buffer
having picture elements (Col. 3, lines 36-37).
9. Each of the picture elements may consist of an 8-bit number
representing the brightness of that spot in the image (Col. 3, lines 37-39).
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