The copy mode selection, such as the text mode and photo mode, of a digital copy machine can provide suitable process and enhancement for the scanned image. To classify the scanned image without expensive hardware and reduce the running time, in this article, we designed an efficient automatic method for classifying a document image using a probabilistic decision strategy. The proposed algorithm is tailored to inexpensive hardware and significantly reduces both the running time and memory requirements compared to the existing algorithms, while substantially improving the classification accuracy. In addition, we incorporate a new classification module to help avoid moiré patterns by identifying periodic halftone noise.