Patent ID: 7570403

Claim:
A color image processing apparatus comprising: a color frequency-of-occurrence counting section which counts frequencies of occurrence of colors in input color document data on a page-by-page basis; a page layout generating section which discriminates a photo region and a non-photo region and generates page layout attribute information at a given position in the color document data; a color-assignment table generating section which generates a color-assignment table corresponding to a combination of an arbitrary input color category and an arbitrary page layout attribute, on the basis of color frequency-of-occurrence information that is delivered from the color frequency-of-occurrence counting section; a color categorizing section which classifies input colors at positions of interest in the input color document data into predetermined color categories, and generates color category attribute information that is representative of a classification result; and a color conversion section which converts the input colors at positions of interest in the input color document data to colors that are designated by the color-assignment table that is generated by the color-assignment table generating section, on the basis of the color category attribute information that is generated by the color categorizing section and the page layout attribute information that is generated by the page layout generating section; wherein the positions of interest correspond to different regions of a document, the color-assignment table assigns one or more desired colors to each of the different regions, and the number of desired colors is variable for each of the different regions; and wherein the color-assignment table is generated by the color-assignment table generating section based on a color-assignment rule delivered to the color image processing apparatus for an external device and a histogram that is delivered from the color frequency-of-occurrence counting section.