“The Federal Circuit concluded the reference ‘logically would have commended itself to an inventor’s attention in considering his problems.’” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision on Friday, August 14, in The Nielsen Company (US), LLC v. TVision Insights, Inc., affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decision that invalidated challenged claims of a Nielsen audience measurement patent as obvious. The court rejected arguments that the Board improperly relied on a scientific publication as analogous prior art and that the publication failed to disclose the claimed resolution reducing and facial recognition steps. TVision Insights, Inc. filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) of U.S. Patent No. 11,470,243, owned by The Nielsen Company (US), LLC, titled “Methods and Apparatus to Capture Images.” The patent relates to systems for measuring and identifying the audience of a media presentation device such as a television. The specification describes a camera-based system that uses a “people counter” to detect audience members based on features such as heads and faces in low-resolution images. A “person identifier” then compares the detected faces against stored facial signatures using higher-resolution images. TVision’s petition challenged 14 claims, but Nielsen disclaimed the 3 independent claims at issue in its preliminary response, and the Board instituted review of 11 dependent claims, with claims 4 through 6 becoming the focus of the appeal. Claim 4 recites processor circuitry that reduces the resolution of a first image to obtain a reduced resolution image and determines head orientation based on that image. Claims 5 and 6 add a two-step process that generates a facial signature from a separate image corresponding to the head location identified in the reduced resolution image, then compares that signature against a database of stored signatures. The Board considered two