Progress in Pattern Recognition, Image Analysis and Applications : 13th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2008, Havana, Cuba, September 9-12, 2008, Proceedings

The 13th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP 2008, C- greso IberoAmericano de Reconocimiento de Patrones) was the 13th event in a seriesofpioneercongressesonpatternrecognitioninthecommunityofIberoam- icancountries. As was the case for previous conferences, CIARP 2008 attracted participants from around the world with the aim of promoting and disseminating ongoing researchon mathematical methods and computing techniques for pattern rec- nition, computer vision, image analysis, and speech recognition, as well as their application in such diverse areas as robotics, industry, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, data mining, document analysis, and natural language processing and recognition to name only few of them. Mo- over, it provided a forum for scienti?c research, experience exchange, share of new knowledge and an increase in cooperation between research groups in p- tern recognition and related areas. It is important to underline the fact that these conferences have contributed signi?cantly to the growth of national associations for pattern recognitionin the Iberoamerican region, all of them as members of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). This year, the forum attracted participants from 34 countries (8 from Iberoamerica), who submitted a total of 182 papers. After a serious reviewing process in which allthe submissions where double-blind reviewedby at least two prestigiousreviewers,93 papersby180authors from29 countries wereaccepted, all of them with a scienti?c quality above overall mean rating.