To highly accurately recognize characters from a color image containing characters.

An image processing apparatus includes a character image region extracting section 30 for extracting a region containing a character image from a color image; a first monochrome deciding section 32 for determining whether the character image contained in the region extracted by the extracting section 30 is monochrome or not; a second monochrome determining section 34 for determining whether a background portion other than the character image contained in the region extracted by the extracting means 30 is monochrome or not; and a character image mask generating section 36 for binarizing the region extracted by the extracting section 30 to generate a character image mask if the determining section 32 determines that the character image is monochrome, and reversing the image obtained by binarizing the region extracted by the extracting section 30 to generate a character image mask if the determining section 32 determines that the character image is no monochrome and the determining section 34 determines that the background portion is monochrome.

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