An image processing apparatus of an embodiment of the invention includes a character region characteristic determination unit to identify a character region of an image and to output a character region characteristic determination signal, a character region image separation unit to separate, based on the character region characteristic determination signal, the image into at least two attribute regions, that is, plural character region images and an other region image, and a separated image processing unit to process each of the plural character region images and the other region image, and in at least the separated image processing unit, according to a characteristic of each of the plural character region images, at least one process of a compression method, a compression ratio, a resolution, and a multi-value number for at least one of the character region images is different from a process of the other region image or the other character region image.