Patent decision
- BL number
- O/119/12
- Concerning rights in
- GB0624420.6
- Hearing Officer
- Mr P Slater
- Decision date
- 16 March 2012
- Person(s) or Company(s) involved
- Sony United Kingdom Limited
- Provisions discussed
- PA 1977 Section 1(2)
- Keywords
- Excluded fields (refused)
- Related Decisions
- None
Summary
The invention relates to a system for managing the storage and retrieval of items of information, for example, video images and/or audio data, and the indexing of those images by generation of additional keywords and phrases “textual metadata” representing the identity or content of those images. This additional data is stored alongside the image to facilitate searching. Traditionally, indexing of images by creation of textual metadata has been done manually by the user inspecting each and every image prior to storage, selecting appropriate keywords and phrases which are then keyed in and stored in association with the image. This process is both onerous to the user and costly. The present invention seeks to solve the problem by at least partly automating the process. The system achieves this by creating a feature vector representing various properties of the image e.g. colour, and using this feature vector to search for similar images which are already stored within the system. The system then searches the textual data stored alongside those images for common keywords and/or phrases and stores these alongside the original image or presents the user with an opportunity to accept, add or edit the metadata before storage. This new combination of feature vector and textual metadata being more representative of the images identity and content helps facilitate the process of searching making it faster, more efficient and presenting more reliable results.
The Hearing Officer considered the four-step test in Aerotel/Macrossan in the light of the Symbian judgment, and having considered the signposts set out in AT&T/CVON, found the contribution to relate to a computer program as such, and having found no technical contribution refused the application under Section 18(3).
Full decision O/119/12 
84Kb
