This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP'99, held in Ljubliana, Slovenia in September 1999. The 47 revised full papers presented were selected from 120 submissions. Also included are two invited contributions and 27 posters. The papers are organized in sections on color; image processing; image databases; image compression and watermarking; object and face recognition; classification and fitting; 3D-reconstruction and shape representation; motion, range image registration; applications; shape from shading, texture and stereo; real-time tracking; panoramic images; grouping; image rendering; and alignment and matching.

Computer vision solutions used to be very specific and difficult to adapt to different or even unforeseen situations. The current development is calling for simple to use yet robust applications that could be employed in various situations. This trend requires the reassessment of some theoretical issues in computer vision. A better general understanding of vision processes, new insights and better theories are needed. The papers selected from the conference staged in Dagstuhl in 1996 to gather scientists from the West and the former eastern-block countries address these goals and cover such fields as 2D images (scale space, morphology, segmentation, neural networks, Hough transform, texture, pyramids), recovery of 3-D structure (shape from shading, optical flow, 3-D object recognition) and how vision is integrated into a larger task-driven framework (hand-eye calibration, navigation, perception-action cycle).

Computer Vision is a rapidly growing field of research investigating computational and algorithmic issues associated with image acquisition, processing, and understanding. It serves tasks like manipulation, recognition, mobility, and communication in diverse application areas such as manufacturing, robotics, medicine, security and virtual reality. This volume contains a selection of papers devoted to theoretical foundations of computer vision covering a broad range of fields, e.g. motion analysis, discrete geometry, computational aspects of vision processes, models, morphology, invariance, image compression, 3D reconstruction of shape. Several issues have been identified to be of essential interest to the community: non-linear operators; the transition between continuous to discrete representations; a new calculus of non-orthogonal partially dependent systems.