Abstract: A method and apparatus for adaptive color scanning/printing data correction to effectively adjust to an arbitrary combination of color image scanning input and printing output devices for reproducing color image at optimized resemblance. An improved back propagation algorithm is employed to reduce the learning error and accelerate the process of learning procedure by increasing the rate of convergence. A method of characteristics extracting functionalization is utilized to urge the successful convergence of the learning procedure of the neural network, and reduce the color discrepancy and accelerate the process of learning convergence. An enhanced grey-scale balancing scheme is also utilized to extract the grey component of a learning sample under a predetermined condition and re fetch again to the neural network for accelerated convergence of the learning behavior.