CIARP 2003 (8th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition) was the eighth event in a series of pioneering congresses on pattern recognition in the Latin American c- munity of countries. This year, however, the forum was extended to include worldwide participation. The event has been held in the past in Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and Por- gal; it took place this year in Havana (Cuba). The aim of the congress was to promote and disseminate ongoing research into mathematical methods for pattern recognition, computer vision, image analysis, and speech recognition, as well as the application of...