Introduction

Abstract

Pattern recognition can be defined as the classification of data based on knowledge already gained or on statistical information extracted from patterns and/or their representations.

It has several important applications. Multimedia document recognition (MDR) and automatic medical diagnosis are two such applications. For example, in MDR we have to deal with a combination of text, audio and video data. The text data may be made up of alpha-numerical characters corresponding to one or more natural languages. The audio data could be in the form of speech or music. Similarly, the video data could be a single image or a sequence of images—for example, the face of a criminal, his fingerprint and signature could come in the form of a single image. It is also possible to have a sequence of images of the same individual moving in an airport in the form of a video clip.