1. A method for reading and authenticating documents to determine if they are genuine, counterfeit, or if they have been altered, each document type having a number of attributes, said method comprising the steps of: partitioning a reference document, for each document type that is to be read and authenticated, into a number of segments each containing a number of pixels; determining a correlation number for each reference document segment based on a characteristic of the segment; analyzing a first image of a first document for a first attribute that is then used to identify all possible document types that have the first attribute; partitioning the first image of the first document into a number of segments each containing a number of pixels, the location and size of the first document segments being the same as the reference documents that have the same first attribute; determining a correlation number for first selected segments of the first document image based on a characteristic of the first selected segments that is identical to the same characteristic in the corresponding segments of the reference documents that have the same first attribute as the first document; comparing the correlation number for each first selected segment of the first document with the correlation number of the corresponding segments of the reference documents that have the same first attribute as the first document; and identifying the document type of the first document based on the value of the correlation numbers.