This volume offers an overview of the latest developments and achievements in the field of pattern recognition, an active area of research with many applications, some of which have received commercial maturity.

Background structure in document imaging, H. Baird; recent advances in string matching, H. Bunke; relational morphology, R. Haralick; structural model learning from multiple images, R. Mohr; language models based on stochastic grammars, R. de Mori; object recognition by a robust matching technique, H, Niemann et al; a new efficient method to represent and process proximity and similarity in sets of complex structures, H. Noltemeier; shape classification in computer vision by the syntactic, morphological and neural processing technique PDL-HM, L.F. Pau et al; understanding neural nets for grammatical inference and recognition, A. Sanfeliu; selection of landmarks based upon 3-D and iconic properties, S. Tsuji.