Patent ID: 7386168

Claim:
An image processing apparatus which compresses an input multilevel image, comprising: binarizing means for binarizing the multilevel image; first region specifying means for specifying a position of a character region in the binary image binarized by said binarizing means, and determining whether or not the specified character region is an inverted character region; second region specifying means for specifying a position of a unit character region in the character region specified by said first region specifying means; reducing means for reducing the multilevel image; representative color extracting means for extracting a representative color of the unit character region on the basis of region type information indicting whether or not the character region specified by said first region specifying means is an inverted character region, position information of the unit character region specified by said second region specifying means, and the reduced multilevel image; padding means for padding a unit character region in the character region of the reduced multilevel image with a neighboring color on the basis of the position information of the character region specified by said first region specifying means; first compression means for compressing the padded reduced multilevel image created by said padding means; second compression means for compressing a partial binary image corresponding to the character region specified by said first region specifying means; and output means for outputting compressed data containing the position information specified by said first and second region specifying means, first and second compressed codes created by said first and second compression means, and representative color information of the unit character region extracted by said representative color extracting means.