More than ten years have passed since the untimely death of King-Sun Fu, one of the great pioneers in the field of pattern recognition. It was he, more than any other single individual, who nurtured the field during its formative years, and set the tone and tempo for others to follow. This book is dedicated to his memory. This book contains 11 chapters by authors who knew King-Sun Fu and in varying degrees interacted with him. The articles span the field of pattern recognition in its current state, and cover such diverse topics as neural nets, covariance propagation, genetic selection, shape...

Since its publication in 1976, the original volume has been warmly received. We have decided to put out this updated paperback edition so that the book can be more accessible to students. This paperback edition is essentially the same as the original hardcover volume except for the addition of a new chapter (Chapter 7) which reviews the recent advances in pattern recognition and image processing. Because of the limitations of length, we can only report the highlights and point the readers to the literature. A few typographical errors in the original edition were corrected. We are grateful to...