Nuance Commc'ns, Inc. v. ABBYY USA Software House, Inc., No. 14-1629 (Fed. Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CaseOptical character recognition (OCR) systems analyze characters in a scanned image using various techniques. Template matching involves comparing a character in the digital image with templates of known characters. If there is no matching template, feature analysis is used: examining the characteristics of unknown characters to determine what they are. Sometimes template matching and feature analysis result in more than one possible character—such as a lowercase or uppercase “S”—in which case context analysis is used to look to the character’s special context and linguistic context to determine the correct character. Nuance’s 342 patent describes template matching and feature analysis and using the results of the feature analysis to build new templates that can later be used in the first step of template matching. In Nuance’s suit, a jury returned a verdict of non-infringement. The Federal Circuit affirmed, rejecting arguments that the district court improperly adopted a dictionary definition for disputed claim limitations and that Nuance was denied due process when the court entered final judgment against Nuance as to all of its patents, even those that Nuance chose not to assert at trial.
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