The book is an extensive compilation of the papers presented at the IAPR International Workshop on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition SSPR'94. It includes a preface by Professor Herbert Freeman, who is the recipient of the IAPR King Sun Fu Award for 1994. The book is divided into four parts and covers state-of-the art topics related to a variety of aspects of pattern recognition.

This book is currently the only one on this subject containing both introductory material and advanced recent research results. It presents, at one end, fundamental concepts and notations developed in syntactic and structural pattern recognition and at the other, reports on the current state of the art with respect to both methodology and applications. In particular, it includes artificial intelligence related techniques, which are likely to become very important in future pattern recognition.The book consists of individual chapters written by different authors. The chapters are grouped into broader subject areas like “Syntactic Representation and Parsing”, “Structural Representation and Matching”, “Learning”, etc. Each chapter is a self-contained presentation of one particular topic. In order to keep the original flavor of each contribution, no efforts were undertaken to unify the different chapters with respect to notation. Naturally, the self-containedness of the individual chapters results in some redundancy. However, we believe that this handicap is compensated by the fact that each contribution can be read individually without prior study of the preceding chapters. A unification of the spectrum of material covered by the individual chapters is provided by the subject and author index included at the end of the book.

The very significant advances in computer vision and pattern recognition and their applications in the last few years reflect the strong and growing interest in the field as well as the many opportunities and challenges it offers. The second edition of this handbook represents both the latest progress and updated knowledge in this dynamic field. The applications and technological issues are particularly emphasized in this edition to reflect the wide applicability of the field in many practical problems. To keep the book in a single volume, it is not possible to retain all chapters of the first edition. However, the chapters of both editions are well written for permanent reference. This indispensable handbook will continue to serve as an authoritative and comprehensive guide in the field.

Spectral Geometry of Shapes presents unique shape analysis approaches based on shape spectrum in differential geometry. It provides insights on how to develop geometry-based methods for 3D shape analysis. The book is an ideal learning resource for graduate students and researchers in computer science, computer engineering and applied mathematics who have an interest in 3D shape analysis, shape motion analysis, image analysis, medical image analysis, computer vision and computer graphics. Due to the rapid advancement of 3D acquisition technologies there has been a big increase in 3D shape data that requires a variety of shape analysis methods, hence the need for this comprehensive resource.

The book provides a comprehensive view of pattern recognition concepts and methods, illustrated with real-life applications in several areas. A CD-ROM offered with the book includes datasets and software tools, making it easier to follow in a hands-on fashion, right from the start.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition, SSPR 2004 and the 5th International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SPR 2004, held jointly in Lisbon, Portugal, in August 2004. The 59 revised full papers and 64 revised poster papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 219 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on graphs; visual recognition and detection; contours, lines, and paths; matching and superposition; transduction and translation; image and video analysis; syntactics, languages, and strings; human shape and action; sequences and graphs; pattern matching and classification; document image analysis; shape analysis; multiple classifier systems; density estimation; clustering; feature selection; classification; and representation.

Recent years have seen dramatic progress in shape recognition algorithms applied to ever-growing image databases. They have been applied to image stitching, stereo vision, image mosaics, solid object recognition and video or web image retrieval. More fundamentally, the ability of humans and animals to detect and recognize shapes is one of the enigmas of perception. The book describes a complete method that starts from a query image and an image database and yields a list of the images in the database containing shapes present in the query image. A false alarm number is associated to each detection. Many experiments will show that familiar simple shapes or images can reliably be identified with false alarm numbers ranging from 10-5 to less than 10-300. Technically speaking, there are two main issues. The first is extracting invariant shape descriptors from digital images. Indeed, a shape can be seen from various angles and distances and in various lights.