Patent US 5,872,864

An image processing apparatus includes an image input section, a color image/monochrome image converting section for performing image area division, a binarization circuit for binarizing a converted monochrome image, a reducing section for reducing a binary image, a boundary extracting section for extracting the boundaries between the areas of constituent elements constituting an input image, e.g., a binary image and a continuous gradation image, and a kind-of-image determining section for determining the kinds of images in partial areas defined by the extracted boundaries. For example, the image processing apparatus further includes a data compressing section. In the image processing apparatus, pre-processing is performed to efficiently performing pattern determination in consideration of localization of frequencies of occurrence of edges and black pixel patterns of an image, and kind-of-image determination is performed by a neural network on the basis of the data obtained by pre-processing, thus performing suitable processing such as data compression in accordance with the determination result.