Book excerpt: The field of pattern recognition has seen enormous progress since its beginnings almost 50 years ago. A large number of different approaches have been proposed. Hybrid methods aim at combining the advantages of different paradigms within a single system. Hybrid Methods in Pattern Recognition is a collection of articles describing recent progress in this emerging field. It covers topics such as the combination of neural nets with fuzzy systems or hidden Markov models, neural networks for the processing of symbolic data structures, hybrid methods in data mining, the combination of symbolic and subsymbolic learning, and so on. Also included is recent work on multiple classifier systems. Furthermore, the book deals with applications in on-line and off-line handwriting recognition, remotely sensed image interpretation, fingerprint identification, and automatic text categorization.