Patent ID: 7180533

Claim:
An image processing apparatus, comprising: an exposing device for exposing a thermally developable image forming material so as to form a latent image on the image forming material based on image data; a thermal developing device for thermally developing and visualizing the latent image on the exposed image forming material so as to form an image; a measuring device for measuring an image density of the image on the developed image forming material; a calibrating device for forming a table to define a relation between an image signal and image density thereof based on a plurality of different test image data and measured image densities thereof; a storing device for storing characteristic change model data indicating a characteristic change of the thermal developing device over time after starting of operation of the image processing apparatus; a difference calculating device to calculate, each time an image is formed based on an image signal corresponding to diagnostic image data, a density difference between an image density at a time at which the table was formed and an image density at a time at which the image is formed based on the image signal corresponding to the diagnostic image data, said calculation of the density difference being performed based on the characteristic change model data; and a correcting device for correcting the table based on the density difference calculated by the difference calculating device.