Patent ID: 8045801

Claim:
An image processing apparatus comprising: a region segmentation unit adapted to segment an image into a plurality of regions, the plurality of segmented regions including a region of a first attribute and a region of a second attribute; a feature amount acquisition unit adapted to acquire image feature amount data of the region of the first attribute from an image included in the region of the first attribute, wherein the feature amount acquisition unit does not acquire image feature amount data of the region of the second attribute; a compression unit adapted to acquire compressed data of the region of the first attribute by applying lossy compression to the image corresponding to the region of the first attribute, and adapted to acquire compressed data of the region of the second attribute by applying lossless compression to the image corresponding to the region of the second attribute; and an output unit adapted to output the image feature amount data of the region of the first attribute acquired by said feature amount acquisition unit and the compressed data acquired by said compression unit as output data of the image, wherein the output image feature amount data is used for retrieving the compressed data of the region of the first attribute from a database which stores the output data of the image, and wherein said feature amount acquisition unit acquires the image feature amount data of the region of the first attribute before said compression unit applies the lossy compression to the image corresponding to the region of the first attribute.