IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 84

Conditions Indicate
Possibility of Red-Eye?

300

310
Flash Used?

No

Yes

320

Low Ambient
Lighting?

No

Yes

330

Subject Close to
Camera?

No

Yes

340

Red-Eye Possible

315
Red-Eye Not Possible

FIGuRE 1. U.S. Patent 6,407,777 was the first patent to claim use of image acquisition
data to decide if the red-eye effect could be present in an image.

there will be a court challenge to the original patent grant. That is something that a
patent examiner wants to avoid because if
the court challenges his original granting
of a patent, that is a black mark for him.
So, patent examiners like long claims
with many required steps.
After a long day in the office interpreting the meaning of complex,
obscure, occasionally unintelligible
claim structures, what is the best way to
gauge if a claim set is "long enough" to
be allowable-yes, use that pencil
behind your ear to make the decision. Of
course, we all know that patent examiners take their work far too seriously to
ever apply this in practice, but it makes
for a nice urban legend. Now you will
also know what your IP guy means the
next time he refers to the pencil test.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD
PATENT CLAIM?
Now we know the sort of claims that
patent examiners are happy to allow.
However, the best claims are exactly
the opposite. Typically, they describe
something that you must absolutely do,
know, or figure out to solve a problem
and very little else.
The best way to explain a good patent claim is through an example, and
the best example I can give relates to
one I know very well, which is related
to the problem of the red-eye effect in
digital cameras [2], [3]. The particular
84 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

^

july 2015

patent that springs to mind is U.S. Patent 6,407,777 "Red-Eye Filter Method
and Apparatus" with primary inventor
Michael J. DeLuca. This was far from
the first patent to consider how to solve
the red-eye problem. In fact, the redeye effect has plagued photography for
over a century-ever since the invention of flash illumination. Our eyes
respond to the sudden burst of flash
illumination by lighting up internally
like great big reflectors, and the red
color of internal blood vessels gives us
bright red pupils for a short instant.
Unfortunately, this is also the instant
when a photographic image is captured.
As our eyes are also the focal point of
our faces, which, in turn, are the focal
point of most photographs, this effect
tends to spoil a lot of them.
Before U.S. Patent 6,407,777, there
were quite a few patents that dealt with
the red-eye effect. In fact, almost every
company involved in the photography or
computer industry had some patents on
techniques to correct or detect the red-eye
effect in digital images. Kodak was a
leader with advanced systems for batch
processing red-eye images, but there
were also many others.
So, why was U.S. Patent 6,407,777 so
important, and why did it eventually
become so valuable? The reason is simple-DeLuca was the first to realize that
1) you could perform the image processing in the camera itself and 2) you could

determine important information about the
conditions under which the image was
acquired and use this information to
decide if a red-eye filter should be applied.
This second point is illustrated in Figure 1.
If you read the claims from this patent, you can see that (the key elements
are italicized):
Within a portable digital camera
having no photographic film, a
method of filtering a red-eye phenomenon from a digital image
comprising a multiplicity of pixels indicative of color, the pixels
forming various shapes of the
image, the method comprising the
steps of:
▼ locating pixels having a color
indicative of the red-eye
phenomenon
▼ determining if a grouping of
at least a portion of the pixels
of said step locating comprise
a shape indicative of the redeye phenomenon
▼ modifying the color of the
grouping in response to said
step of determining
▼ analyzing if conditions of
recording of the image are
indicative of the red-eye phenomenon, wherein said step of
modifying is selectively performed in response thereto.
If you think about it, when this patent was filed (in 1997), the typical
digital camera could not even capture
a full VGA (640 × 480 pixels) image,
and, in low lighting conditions, it
could take 15-20 s to achieve a useful
exposure. Capturing video in these
early cameras simply was not possible, and no one had really thought that
you might actually want to process
images in the camera when you captured the original.
Still, on its own, that would not
have been sufficient for the grant of a
patent because a patent examiner
would have considered the invention
as simply repeating the same steps as a
detection-and-correction algorithm running on a desktop computer. However,
the addition of the step of determining
the "conditions of recording of the
image" was not something that any



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