Book excerpt: This book is designed for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Computer Science and Engineering, Information Technology, Electronics and Communication Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. The book comprehensively covers all the important topics in digital image processing and pattern recognition along with the fundamental concepts, mathematical preliminaries and theoretical derivations of significant theorems. The image processing topics include coverage of image formation, digitization, lower level processing, image analysis, image compression, and so on. The topics on pattern recognition include statistical decision making, decision tree learning, artificial neural networks, clustering and others. An application of simulated annealing for edge detection is described in an appendix. The book is profusely illustrated with more than 200 figures and sketches as an added feature. KEY FEATURES: Provides a large number of worked examples to strengthen the grasp of the concepts. Lays considerable emphasis on the algorithms in order to teach students how to write good practical programs for problem solving. Devotes a separate chapter to currently used image format standards. Offers problems at the end of each chapter to help students test their understanding of the fundamentals of the subject.