a document imaging system includes means whereby a large number of anomalous condition indicators or flags that define anomalous conditions that may occur as a result of the operation of a document scanner and / or document processor . a computationally efficient subset of flags and flag combinations is defined , and these subsets of flags and flag combinations are related to a quantitative measure of the quality of the related document images , the documents themselves , and units of work that contain a plurality of documents . the machine computation of quality is compared to a human perception of quality , and computational input parameters are adjusted to improve the match of computational quality to the human quality perception , thus teaching the machine to make proper determinations of image and document quality .