Patent 7821688 was granted and assigned to Murata Machinery on October, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An original document is scanned, an arbitrary color area in a chromaticity plane is extracted with respect to the scanned original document, coordinate conversion is performed on the extracted color area in the chromaticity plane, and a mask area is determined to be masked, in accordance with the converted color area on which the coordinate conversion has been performed.