The present document is directed to methods and subsystems that identify and characterize document-containing subimages in a document-containing image. In one implementation, each type of document is modeled as a set of features that are extracted from a set of images known to contain the document. To locate and characterize a document subimage in an image, the currently described methods and subsystems extract features from the image and then match model features of each model in a set of models to the extracted features to select the model that best corresponds to the extracted features. Additional information contained in the selected model is then used to identify the location of the subimage corresponding to the document and to process the document subimage to correct for a variety of distortions and deficiencies in order to facilitate subsequent data extraction from the corrected document subimage.