Patent ID: 8345980

Claim:
An image processing apparatus, comprising: first acquisition means for acquiring paper fingerprint information and document information from an encoded image in a manuscript; second acquisition means for acquiring paper fingerprint information from a paper fingerprint acquisition area in the manuscript; third acquisition means for acquiring document information from a document information acquisition area in the manuscript; first collation means for collating the paper fingerprint information acquired by said first acquisition means and the paper fingerprint information acquired by said second acquisition means; second collation means for collating the document information acquired by said first acquisition means and the document information acquired by said third acquisition means; and determination means for determining whether said manuscript is an original from the collation results of said first collation means and said second collation means; wherein the first collation means determines a similarity between the paper fingerprint information acquired by said first acquisition means and the paper fingerprint information acquired by said second acquisition means by using the following formula E = ∑ x , y ⁢ α 1 ⁡ ( x , y ) ⁢ α 2 ⁡ ( x , y ) ⁢ { f 1 ⁡ ( x , y ) - f 2 ⁡ ( x , y ) } 2 ∑ x , y ⁢ α 1 ⁡ ( x , y ) ⁢ α 2 ⁡ ( x , y ) where α 1 is a mask data of the paper fingerprint information acquired by said first acquisition means, f 1 is a gray-scale data of the paper fingerprint information acquired by said first acquisition means, α 2 is a mask data of the paper fingerprint information acquired by said second acquisition means, and f 2 is a gray-scale data of the paper fingerprint information acquired by said second acquisition means.