An image processing apparatus is configured to include: illumination controlling section for controlling emission of light with a setting amount of light; region extracting section for independently extracting the image data of an object region indicating the object, and image data of a background region indicating background other than the object from reference image data out of two pieces of image data, respectively obtained at each change in an amount of the light from the illumination unit; filter processing section for applying a filtering process with the blurring effect to at least one piece of the image data of the object region and the background region, both extracted by the region extracting section; and combining section for generating combined image data of the reference image data with the image data subject to the filtering processing out of the image data of the object region and the background region.