1. An image processing apparatus comprising: a scanning unit configured to scan image information regarding an original document, the original document having character addition information associated with at least one word of the original document, the character addition information added manually to the original document; an analyzing unit configured to extract layout information regarding character regions and the character addition information within the character regions from the image information scanned by the scanning unit; an optical character recognition (OCR) processing unit configured to convert the character regions extracted by the analyzing unit into character information; an extracting unit configured to extract the at least one word from the character information converted by the OCR processing unit in response to the at least one word having a predefined image characteristic in the character addition information; a searching unit configured to perform a search by use of the at least one word extracted by the extracting unit and generate meta-information based on a result of the search; and an electronic document generating unit configured to generate an electronic document according to a predetermined format by adding the meta-information to the character information.