Patent ID: 7889920

Claim:
An image processing apparatus, comprising: a color determination unit which determines a color of a copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data; a color space determination unit which determines a color space for compressing the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data based on the result of determination by the color determination unit; a compression unit which compresses the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data in the color space determined by the color space determination unit, wherein the color space determination unit determines the color space so that a data amount of compressed data after compressing the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data by the compression unit decreases; and a control unit which stores the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data compressed by the compression unit in a storage unit, wherein the compression unit compresses the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data by lossy compression, the color determination unit determines whether a color of the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data is black, it is determined by the color space determination unit that the color space for compressing the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data is YCbCr space when the result of determination by the color determination unit is black, it is determined by the color space determination unit that the color space for compressing the copy-forgery-inhibited pattern image data is RGB space when the result of determination by the color determination unit is not black, and a processor is configured to function as at least one of the color determination unit, the color space determination unit, the compression unit and the control unit.