US Patent 7474445 Image forming apparatus

An image forming apparatus includes an interface which receives a job of requesting an accelerator function, from the outside, a processing path decision section which determines whether a first image processing path to perform image processing in a copy operation overlaps a second image processing path to perform image processing in the execution of the accelerator function in the job received via the interface, and an image processing section which performs image processing in a copy operation and image processing in the execution of the accelerator function at the same time, when the processing path decision section determines that the first image processing path does not overlap the second image processing path.