Patent ID: 8031934

Claim:
An image processing apparatus comprising: a character-area extraction section operable to extract a character area from color image data; a color-difference-value acquisition section operable to acquire information about respective color-difference values of pixels in the character area extracted by said character-area extraction section; a color-saturation-value acquisition section operable to acquire information about respective color saturation values of the pixels in the character area extracted by said character-area extraction section; a color-difference-subrange storage section which stores a plurality of color-difference subranges pre-defined by dividing an overall color-difference range of zero degree to 360 degree into a plurality of subranges; a chromatic-region determination section operable, when the information about the color salutation values of the pixels in the character area acquired by said color-saturation-value acquisition section fails to satisfy a preset determination condition for determining whether a character area has a chromatic color, to determine said character area as a gray region, and, when the information about the color salutation values of the pixels in said character area satisfies said determination condition, to determine said character area as a chromatic region; a first color-difference-subrange assignment section operable, based on the information about the pixel color-difference values acquired by said color-difference-value acquisition section, to assign any one of the plurality of color-difference subranges stored in said color-difference-subrange storage section, to the character area determined as the chromatic region by said chromatic-region determination section; and a representative-color setup section operable to set color information about a representative color of the character area determined as the chromatic region by said chromatic-region determination section, using an average of the pixel color-difference values acquired by said color-difference-value acquisition section and included in the color-difference subrange assigned to said character area.