Research in the field of pattern recognition both in theo- retical terms
and in the area of appl ication continues to flourish. Pattern
recognition is a fairly diverse field involving researchers whose
primary disciplines spread over at least a half dozen fields. Possibly
because of the great diversity of backgrounds but a common interest in
certain broad areas of application, the field has grown so rapidly and
yet seems to promise at least a similar growth rate for the future. This
book is a collection containing some of the papers that were presented
at the N. A. T. O. Advanced Study Institute held in Bandol, France,
September 1975. The main purpose of the institute was to present
material which would provide a basic background in the field. Thus,
survey papers covering syntactic methods, picture processing,
classification theory, and speech recognition were presented. This
should have provided the listener (and we hope now, the reader) with an
acquaintance with the basic tools, a look at some of the appl ications
and an appraisal of how each of the particular topics will evolve. A
more recent addition to the pattern recognition "family" is the work in
the areas of economics and group choice. Since the process of
recognizing and inter- preting patterns is so fundamental, it probably
is no surprise when a particular discipline is discovered to be amenable
to the already developed techniques.