Image encoded documents are identified by recognizing known objects in each document with an object recognizer. The objects in each page are filtered to remove lower order objects. Known features in the objects are recognized by sequentially organizing each object in each filtered page into a one-dimensional array, where each object is positioned in a corresponding one-dimensional array as a function of location in the corresponding filtered page. The one-dimensional array is then compared to known arrays to classify the image document corresponding to the one-dimensional array.