Book excerpt: During the past fifteen years there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of pattern recognition. Contributions to the blossom of this area have come from many disciplines, including statistics, psychology, linguistics, computer science, biology, taxonomy, switching theory, communication theory, control theory, and operations research. Many different approaches have been proposed and a number of books have been published. Most books published so far deal with the decision-theoretic (or statistical) approach or the syntactic (or linguistic) approach. Since the area of pattern recognition is still far from its maturity, many new research results, both in theory and in applications, are continuously produced. The purpose of this monograph is to provide a concise summary of the major recent developments in pattern recognition. The five main chapters (Chapter 2-6) in this book can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters concern primarily with basic techniques in pattern recognition. They include statistical techniques, clustering analysis and syntactic techniques. The last two chapters deal with applications; namely, picture recognition, and speech recognition and understanding. Each chapter is written by one or two distinguished experts on that subject. The editor has not attempted to impose upon the contributors to this volume a uniform notation and terminol ogy, since such notation and terminology does not as yet exist in pattern recognition.