Patent ID: 8922839

Claim:
An information processing apparatus comprising: a unit that holds a minimum number of pixels which can be copied by an equipment that copies information on a printing medium; a unit that acquires a latent image formed by a first region and a second region when one of a latent image region and a background region is defined as the first region, and the other is defined as the second region; a unit that acquires an input image; a generation unit that generates, upon defining, as a highly infrared absorbent color material, a color material having a highest infrared absorbance among a plurality of color materials of different colors used in a printing apparatus, a two-dimensional array that has a specific size and includes array elements in a number smaller than the minimum number of pixels, which have values larger than a threshold determined in advance as an upper limit of an amount of the highly infrared absorbent color material used per unit area, and a plurality of array elements having values smaller than the threshold, thereby generating, as a two-dimensional formation array, a two-dimensional array having a size identical to a size of the latent image from the generated two-dimensional array; a unit that generates, as a configuration image, an image obtained by replacing a pixel value of a pixel at a pixel position belonging to the first region in the latent image with a value at the pixel position in the two-dimensional formation array; and an output unit that outputs, to the printing apparatus, amounts of the plurality of color materials of the different colors used to print a pixel at each pixel position in the input image, wherein said output unit outputs a pixel value at each pixel position in the configuration image, that corresponds to each pixel position in the input image, as an amount of the highly infrared absorbent color material used to print a pixel at the each pixel position in the input image.