Sanfeliu Alberto Sanfeliu – författare

This volume contains 18 papers of high quality, selected to represent the work that is being developed by Spanish research groups in pattern recognition and image analysis. It is partly the result of the efforts of the Spanish Association for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (AERFAI). It is hoped that this volume will increase awareness of Spanish work in the international scientific community and initiate contacts with research groups worldwide.

This book contains a selection of 14 papers presented at the workshop organised by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Technical Committee on Syntactical and Structural Pattern Recognition, at Pont-à-Mousson, 1988. These papers which have been expanded, focus on both fundamental aspects and applications. They show that structural methods are a good framework for integrating both symbolic and numerical knowledge for modeling, recognition and also learning. The applications described are on document analysis, speech and image analysis.

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.