Pattern recognition is the research area that studies the operation and design of systems that recognise patterns in data. It encloses subdisciplines like discriminant analysis, feature extraction, error estimation, cluster analysis (together sometimes called statistical pattern recognition), grammatical inference and parsing (sometimes called syntactical pattern recognition). Important application areas are image analysis, character recognition, speech analysis, man and machine diagnostics, person identification and industrial inspection. This book presents leading-edge research from around the world.