Image forming apparatus with cloud processing and control method therefor

An image forming apparatus comprising:

• a communication interface configured to communicate with a cloud server that performs decoding by any of a plurality of decoding methods corresponding to a plurality of autoencoder models, the plurality of autoencoder models including at least a first autoencoder model and a second autoencoder model;
• an encoder configured to perform encoding by any of a plurality of encoding methods corresponding to the plurality of autoencoder models,
• the plurality of encoding methods including a first encoding method corresponding to the first autoencoder model and a second encoding method corresponding to the second autoencoder model;
• the plurality of encoding methods each being configured to encode image data into intermediate layer data that is configured to be decoded by the cloud server;
• and
• a capacity of the intermediate layer data in the second autoencoder model being larger than a capacity of the intermediate layer data in the first autoencoder model;
• and
• a processor configured to:
• provide an indication to a user that utilizing the second encoding method will incur a greater cost than utilizing the first encoding method;
• control the encoder to encode the image data using the first encoding method in response to a first user input;
• control the encoder to encode the image data using the second encoding method in response to a second user input;
• and
• transmit (a) the intermediate layer data and (b) model information indicating the specified encoding method to the cloud server through the communication interface.

A method of controlling an image forming apparatus including a communication interface, an encoder, and a processor, the method comprising:

• establishing, by the communication interface, communication with a cloud server that executes decoding by any of a plurality of decoding methods corresponding to a plurality of autoencoder models;
• determining, by the processor, a type of OCR processing to be executed by the cloud server based on a user input;
• determining, by the processor, an encoding method to specify according to the determined type of OCR processing, the encoding method corresponding to one of the plurality of autoencoder models;
• specifying, by the processor, the determined encoding method;
• encoding, by the encoder, image data into intermediate layer data according to the specified encoding method, wherein the intermediate layer data is configured to be decoded by the cloud server and the image data includes an image including characters;
• transmitting, through the communication interface, (a) the intermediate layer data and (b) model information indicating the specified encoding method to the cloud server;
• and
• acquiring, through the communication interface, a result of OCR processing executed on an output image acquired by the cloud server by decoding the intermediate layer data.