An image processing apparatus and method for decompressing compressed image data is described. In one embodiment, the image processing apparatus decompresses compressed image data that is obtained by dividing an original image into blocks and compressing each block. The apparatus may comprise a decompression unit to decompress the compressed image data to provide an image which is a collection of the respective blocks, and a smoothing unit to perform a smoothing operation on the decompressed image to control the smoothing effect applied to the image based on distance from a block boundary and based on an edge amount.