Abstract: A completely automated method for classifying electronic images of commercial documents such as invoices, bills of lading, explanations of benefits, etc. is based on the layout of the documents. A document is classified as belonging to a class of similarly laid out images if its distance, determined by a predefined metric, to any of the templates from the same class of templates exceeds a certain user-defined threshold. Alternatively, if the sum of distances from a given image to several templates from the same class exceeds a user-selected threshold, the image is deemed to belong to a class of images with a specific layout.