Appeal No. 2006-2658
Application No. 09/790,334
We must determine what constitutes such “semantic compression
processes” before we can make a reasoned judgment as to whether
Sato anticipates the independent claims.
Appellants contend that the Motion Picture Experts Group
compression standards recited in claim 4 do not constitute
“semantic compression processes.” At page 4 of the supplemental
brief, appellants assert that a “semantic compression process” is
“a compression process that compresses based on the semantics of
the content.” This appears to comport with the definition in the
specification, as in the description of the invention using
computer vision techniques to find “semantically important image
features” (page 13) or the description of prior art “semantic or
content-based compression” (top line of page 9).
Thus, to say that a compression technique is a “semantic
compression process” would appear to mean at least that the
compression process is “content-based,” in accordance with the
description in the instant specification. Moreover, we note that
the specification describes prior art techniques of H.263, MPEG-1
and MPEG-2 as not being based on anything “semantically
meaningful” as far as the content of the image is concerned, and
that is where the new MPEG-4 is an improvement (page 2). These
prior art techniques are described as having “no notion of what
is important to a particular task and hence degrade all
information uniformly” (page 8).
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