The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial & Appeal Board’s decision finding that prior art disclosing a low-resolution system was analogous prior art to claims directed to a high-resolution system for purposes of obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103. The Nielsen Company (US), LLC v. TVision Insights, Inc., Case No. 2025-1371 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 14, 2026) (Dyk, Reyna, Bissoon, JJ.)
Nielsen owns a patent related to audience measurement systems that use cameras to capture images of viewers watching media content. The specification describes a “people counter” that may use low-resolution images to detect audience members and a “person identifier” that uses high-resolution images for facial recognition.
TVision petitioned for inter partes review (IPR), asserting two grounds of obviousness, both of which relied on a scientific publication by Tian as part of the asserted prior-art combinations. The Tian publication, titled “Evaluation of Face Resolution for Expression Analysis,” disclosed experimental results evaluating facial-expression analysis using lower-resolution images “down-sampled from the originals.” The Board held that all challenged claims were obvious on both grounds. Nielsen appealed.
A central issue was whether the Board erred in concluding that Tian qualified as analogous art. Two tests define the scope of analogous art: whether the art is from the same field of endeavor, and if not, whether the reference is still reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with which the inventor is involved. In its petition, TVision asserted that Tian was in the same field of endeavor as Nielsen’s patent. Nielsen responded that Tian was neither in the same field of endeavor nor reasonably pertinent. The Board ultimately concluded that Tian was reasonably pertinent analogous art without reaching the field of endeavor prong. Nielsen argued that the Board violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by applying the reasonably pertinent test when TVision’s petition only argued that Tian was in the same field of endeavor, depriving Nielsen of adequate notice and an opportunity to respond.
The Federal Circuit rejected Nielsen’s APA argument on three independent grounds:
- The Court explained that although the two analogous-art tests are separate, the evidence and analysis relevant to them may overlap. The Court also explained that an analogous-art theory need not be expressly stated and may instead be implicit in the petition. Here, TVision’s discussion of Tian’s analysis of images for head detection and pose estimation placed Nielsen on notice that reasonable pertinence was at issue.
- Nielsen had an opportunity to address reasonable pertinence and in fact addressed both analogous-art prongs in its Patent Owner Response.
- Nielsen conceded that it could not identify any evidence or argument that it had been prevented from presenting. Accordingly, even if there had been a notice error, it was harmless.
On the merits, the Federal Circuit found that substantial evidence supported the Board’s determination that Tian was reasonably pertinent analogous art. The Court rejected Nielsen’s attempt to limit the analysis to prior art that an ordinarily skilled artisan would reasonably search to address the problems specifically identified in the specification. Nielsen argued that the problems should be limited to light-source use as defined in the specification. The Court determined that this would be inappropriate because the claims themselves were not limited to the presence of a light source and were far broader than the problems that Nielsen identified.
Nielsen also challenged the Board’s obviousness findings, arguing first that Tian failed to disclose certain limitations of the challenged claims. The Federal Circuit rejected those arguments because they depended on limitations that the claims did not require. Nielsen further challenged the Board’s finding of a motivation to combine the asserted references. The Court rejected that argument as well, concluding that expert testimony provided substantial evidence supporting the Board’s motivation-to-combine determination on both asserted grounds.
