Ex Parte Dent

Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences

Jun 13, 2012

11143157 (B.P.A.I. Jun. 13, 2012)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
____________

BEFORE THE BOARD OF PATENT APPEALS
AND INTERFERENCES
____________

Ex parte PAUL WILKINSON DENT
____________

Appeal 2010-003889
Application 11/143,157
Technology Center 2100
____________

Before LANCE LEONARD BARRY, ST. JOHN COURTENAY III and
GREGORY J. GONSALVES, Administrative Patent Judges.

GONSALVES, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL
Appeal 2010-003889
Application 11/143,157

2
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Appellant appeals under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the final rejection of
claims 1-37 (App. Br. 2). Claims 38-49 were withdrawn (Id.). We have
jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We reverse.

The Invention
Exemplary independent claim 1 follows:
1. A method for compressing data for storage in
memory, the method comprising:

forming an ordered set of look-up values by reordering,
as necessary, look-up table values in a monotonic order;

pairing adjacent values in said ordered set to form a
plurality of non-overlapping paired values;

for one or more paired values, generating a difference
between said values in said paired values;

reducing a number of bits required to store the look-up
table values by replacing one value in at least one pair of values
with the corresponding difference to generate a compressed
ordered set; and

storing the compressed ordered set in said memory.

The Examiner rejected claims 1-5, 13-16 and 30-31 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Smith (“The Scientist and Engineers
Guide to Digital Signal Processing: Data Compression”) in view of
Reynolds (U.S. 2004/0015358) (Ans. 4-7).
Appeal 2010-003889
Application 11/143,157

3
The Examiner rejected claim 17 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Smith in view of Reynolds and the admitted prior art
(Ans. 7).

ISSUE
Appellant’s responses to the Examiner’s positions present the
following issue:
Did the Examiner err in concluding that the combination of Smith and
Reynolds teaches or suggests “forming an ordered set of look-up values by
reordering, as necessary, look-up table values in a monotonic order; [and]
pairing adjacent values in said ordered set to form a plurality of
non-overlapping paired values,” as recited in independent claim 1, and as
similarly recited in independent claim 30?

ANALYSIS
Appellant argues that independent claims 1 and 30 are not rendered
obvious because Smith and Reynolds do not teach forming an ordered set of
look-up values by “reordering look-up table values in a monotonic order”
(App. Br. 7 (emphasis omitted)). Appellant also argues that Smith and
Reynolds do not teach or suggest “pairing adjacent values in a set of look-up
table values to form a plurality of non-overlapping paired values” (Id.
(emphasis omitted)).
The Examiner found that Figure 27-3 in Smith teaches a table that is
ordered with respect to “the alphabet letter, the order of the probability
values, and the order of pre-zero Huffman coding” (Ans. 9). The Examiner
also found that expressions 1-3 of Reynolds conceptually teach
Appeal 2010-003889
Application 11/143,157

4
non-overlapping paired values (Id.). But claims 1 and 30 require more than
just the pairing of any non-overlapping values; they require the pairing of
adjacent, non-overlapping values from the same table that was reordered in
monotonic order. And the Examiner did not explain how Smith’s table and
Reynolds expressions render obvious the pairing of adjacent, non-
overlapping values from a particular table that was reordered in a particular
order (See Ans. 4-5 and 9-11.) Accordingly, we will not sustain the
Examiner’s rejection of independent claims 1 or 30 or the claims dependent
therefrom (i.e., claims 2-17 and 31-37) because the Examiner did not allege
that any of the other secondary prior art references teach the limitations that
are missing from Smith and Reynolds (Ans. 5-7 and 11).

DECISION
We reverse the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1-17 and 30-37
as obvious.1

REVERSED

pgc

1 We note that it is not necessary for us to address Appellant’s arguments
with respect to the Examiner’s rejections of claims 1-37 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 101 or the obviousness rejections of claims 18-29 because the Examiner
withdrew those rejections (Ans. 8).