Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential opinion in The Nielsen Company (US), LLC v. TVision Insights, Inc., No. 2025-1371 (Aug. 14, 2026), affirming the Board’s finding of obviousness.
Nielsen’s U.S. Patent No. 11,470,243 involves capturing and processing images for audience measurement, using lower-resolution images to count audience members and facial-recognition techniques to identify individuals. TVision petitioned for inter partes review relying on combinations of prior art, including a publication by Tian addressing facial analysis at different resolutions. The Board instituted review of dependent claims 4–6, 8, 11–14, and 18–20, and found all challenged claims unpatentable as obvious. Nielsen appealed.
The Federal Circuit affirmed. First, the Court rejected Nielsen’s assertion that the Board violated the Administrative Procedure Act by addressing whether Tian was “reasonably pertinent” when TVision’s petition argued only that Tian was in the same field of endeavor. The Court explained that the two analogous-art inquiries are separate but may rely on overlapping evidence and concluded that the petition placed Nielsen on notice of the reasonable pertinence issue. The Court also noted that Nielsen identified no prejudice from any alleged lack of notice.
On the merits, the Court held that substantial evidence supported the Board’s finding that Tian was reasonably pertinent analogous art. The relevant problems are not limited to those identified in a patent: the ’243 patent’s claims address image processing and facial detection without a light source, while Tian evaluates facial analysis at different resolutions, including low resolution, making it reasonably pertinent to those problems.
For claims 4–6, the Court refused to narrow the claims beyond their text. Claim 4 required reducing an image’s resolution, not the specification’s pixel-binning technique, reduction of only the first image, or reduction during facial analysis. Claims 5 and 6 required no full-resolution second image. Accordingly, Tian’s disclosure of detecting a face in a first frame and tracking it through the sequence satisfied the claims. Finally, the Court upheld motivation to combine Tian with other references on both asserted grounds. Expert testimony showed that face detection is resource-intensive and reducing image resolution conserves processing resources and time supporting the obviousness findings.
The decision confirms the analogous-art analysis may consider the broader problems addressed by the claims, and courts will not import limitations from particular embodiments into unqualified claim language.
