This decision concerns a European patent application relating to a a story album display method and apparatus. The application was refused by the Examining Division. The applicant filed an appeal but was not successful. Here are the practical takeaways from the decision of T 0646/23 dated December 9, 2024, of Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.07.

Key takeaways

A mere processing of non-technical textual information does not make a technical contribution.

Improving the accuracy of search results to correspond more closely to the user’s subjective wishes is in principle not a technical effect.

Normal physical consequences of non-technical decisions cannot support an inventive step.

The invention

The application relates to a story album. The story album function is as follows: A terminal automatically aggregates images in a gallery to make one or more story albums, so that a user can quickly and conveniently review photos of some past important events (cf. paragraph [0002]).

Fig. 6 of EP3706015

Here is how the invention was defined by claim 1:

  • Claim 1 (main request)

  • Claim 1 (auxiliary request 4)

Is it patentable?

D1 (EP 2 187 322 A1) was considered as the closest prior art. The Examining Division refused the application for lack of inventive step over D1. The Board of Appeal in charge arrived at the same conclusion:

  • Main request and auxiliary requests 1 to 3

The Board found that claim 1 of the main request is not clear. The same reasonings are also applied to claim 1 of auxiliary requests 1 to 3.

4.3 The board notes, however, that the claimed “removing” step does not in any way link the step of “identifying content” or its result to the “invalid label” or to the determination of images “with an image similarity greater than a threshold”. Claim 1 does not express that “screening” an image including “identifying content” of the image means, in one alternative, retrieving a metadata label of the image. Nor does claim 1 express that “image similarity” between one or more images is determined on the basis of the identification of the content of the images.

Although the skilled reader of claim 1 may understand that some kind of link between “identifying content” and the “removing” step is intended, on the basis of the wording of the claim they can only speculate what that link might be.

The board therefore concludes that claim 1 of the main request is not clear (Article 84 EPC).

  • Auxiliary request 4

Claim 1 of auxiliary request 4 was not objected for lacking of clarity. Claim 1 of the fourth auxiliary request is directed to a “story album display method”. According to claim 1:

  • (a) A terminal first selects (“aggregates”) N images from an image collection on the basis of photographing time or photographing location.
  • (b) The terminal then removes a number of images that are determined to be “invalid” to obtain M remaining images, where M < N. An image may be determined to be invalid if it has an “invalid label” or if its “image similarity” to another image is greater than a threshold (“wherein the invalid image comprises an image with an invalid label, or one or more images with an image similarity greater than a threshold”). The remaining M images form a “story album”.
  • (c) On the basis of “an image feature of at least one of the M images”, the terminal determines a “theme associated with the M images”. The terminal modifies this theme, referred to as “the theme of the story album”, on the basis of “association information that is in a target application and that is associated with the theme of the story album”.
  • (d) The terminal then displays an “album cover” of the story album.

The Board found that claim 1 of auxiliary request 4 differs from the terminal of D1 in that the terminal includes software functionality to select a subset of images from the image collection on the basis of criteria involving image similarity and image metadata, where the image metadata includes photographing time, photographing location and image labels or tags (items (a) and (b)). An image of this subset is then selected for display as “album cover” (item (d)).

However, the Board found that the above difference does not make a technical contribution:

This software functionality, however, does not make a technical contribution. Indeed, it cannot be seen what specific technical effect is achieved by the selection of a subset of images from a larger set of images on the basis of these criteria or by the selection of an “album cover” image from the selected subset of images.

Although a specific implementation in software or hardware of such non-technical functionality may in certain cases have technical aspects, for example relating to determining image similarity, technical details of such an implementation are not claimed.

The Board found that claim 1 of auxiliary request 4 further differs from the terminal of D1 in that a “theme” is determined for the subset of M images on the basis of an “image feature” of one of the M images and “association information” such as calendar information, in accordance with item (c).

The Board found that the above difference does not credibly solve a technical problem:

A method of classifying (or recognising) images on the basis of features extracted from the visual content of the images may in certain cases be technical, in particular if it is based on technical considerations relating to image processing. However, the claim leaves the kind of “image feature” undefined, and paragraph [0137] of the description explains that the theme may be determined on the basis of “image features” reflected by the textual labels associated with the M images. Hence, the determination of a “theme” in the present case encompasses a mere processing of non-technical textual information, which does not make a technical contribution.

Moreover, even if the claimed image selection somehow reliably returns what the user is looking for (which is unlikely given that the method does not require the user to give an indication of what they are looking for), improving the accuracy of search results to correspond more closely to the user’s subjective wishes is in principle not a technical effect.

In the present case, claim 1 does not define any user-interface mechanism for allowing a user to search an image, let alone a new mechanism.

Claim 1 does not specify in any detail how the “story album” image selection of first N images and later M < N images is represented in memory. Such an image selection can be represented, for example, as a bitmap indicating which images of the complete collection of images stored on the phone are part of the selection and which are not. In this case, the “removal” of an image from the selection amounts to flipping the bit corresponding to the image from 1 to 0, and no reduction of memory usage is achieved by reducing the number of images in the selection from N to M.

It is therefore not credible that a reduction in working memory usage is achieved over essentially the whole scope of the claim.

7.8.2 Moreover, even if the removal of an image from the “story album” selection did reduce memory usage, this would merely be the physical consequence of the non-technical decision to remove certain images. Memory usage could be even further reduced by removing all but one image, or by not creating the selection at all. Such normal physical consequences of non-technical decisions cannot support an inventive step (see decision T 2230/10, Reasons 3.7 and 3.8).

  • Outcome

The Board found that claim 1 of auxiliary request 4 lacks an inventive step over a well-known prior-art smartphone. Auxiliary requests 5 and 6 were late filed and not admitted. Finally, the Board dismissed the appeal.

More information

You can read the whole decision here: T 0646/23 dated December 9, 2024, of Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.07.

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