Patent ID: 7064866

Claim:
An image forming apparatus comprising: a print engine forming a visible image by image data supplied thereto; a controller receiving original image data from an external image-data source and supplying the image data to said print engine, the original image data being a multiple value image data; and a smoothing unit provided between said controller and said print engine, said smoothing unit comprising: a binary process unit configured to binarize the original image data; a template matching process unit configured to determine whether or not the original image data is to be subjected to a smoothing process by comparing the original image data with a template data, and to output the original image data together with a selection signal indicative of a result of the determination of said template matching process unit; a smoothing process unit configured to selectively apply the smoothing process to the original image data based on the determination of said template matching process unit so as to output a smoothed image data; and a selector configured to select one of the original image data received by the controller and one of the smoothed image data based on the selection signal, wherein said binary process unit binarizes the original image data by comparing the original image data with a threshold value data which is externally changeable, wherein the original image data is a color image data, and the threshold value data is set on an individual color basis, and wherein the color image data includes a set of data for each of a plurality of colors, and a threshold value with respect to black is set lower than a threshold values of other colors.