The present invention is a character recognition apparatus, which comprises a background discriminating section, a non-character line discriminating section, a first non-character line removed image creating section that creates a first non-character line removed image, which is an original image from which the non-character line is removed, a first character area discriminating section, an enlarged image creating section, a second non-character line removed image creating section, an interference judgment section that judges whether or not the character and the non-character line interfere with each other in the original image, a character image restoring section that restores the character image, a second character area discriminating section, and a character recognizing section that digitizes the character area recognized by the second character area discriminating section and recognizes the character, thereby characters written on a color form are recognized at a high accuracy.
An image processing apparatus includes: a memory that stores a background image and a character image that is separate from the background image and overlaps the background image; a processing target area determining unit that determines a processing target area in the background image, the processing target area being in a prescribed positional relation with the character image; a background feature parameter extracting unit that extracts from the processing target area a background feature parameter that includes a feature frequency showing a frequency characteristics of the processing target area; a character feature parameter extracting unit that extracts from the character image a character feature parameter that includes a feature frequency showing a frequency characteristics of the character image; a parameter determining unit that determines a parameter for use in image processing performed on the processing target area, according to a combination of the background feature parameter and the character feature parameter; and an image processor that performs image processing on the processing target area in accordance with the parameter determined by the parameter determining unit.
