US Patent 7164493 Image processing method, system and apparatus, and storage medium

A rasterizer generates bitmap images of RGB on the basis of object data inputted from a printer driver and stores the result in an image memory. The rasterizer brings attribute information representing attributes of the input object data into correspondence with each pixel of the generated bitmap images to store in an attribute map memory. An image processing unit converts RGB bitmap images stored in the image memory into binary bitmap data for each of YMCK colors which can be processed by an image forming unit. The contents of conversion processing such as dither matrix for binarization processing are switched on the basis of the attribute information retained in the attribute map memory.