An image processing apparatus includes a recognition unit that recognizes each cell area corresponding to a living cell from a series of observation images captured at observation time points; a measurement unit that measures cell characteristic amounts of each cell; a tracking unit that determines whether a cell area captured at a processing target time point and a cell area captured earlier than the processing target time point has an identity with each other, and associates the cell areas which have an identity with each other; and a cell division detection processing unit that measures relative position information between a target cell area to be processed and a peripheral cell area positioned around the target cell area, determines whether cell division has occurred in a living cell based on at least the relative position information, and detects a target cell area on which cell division has occurred.