This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2012, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in September 2012. The 109 papers presented, among them two tutorials and four keynotes, were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on face and iris: detection and recognition; clustering; fuzzy methods; human actions and gestures; graphs; image processing and analysis; shape and texture; learning, mining and neural networks; medical images; robotics, stereo vision and real time; remote sensing; signal processing; speech and handwriting analysis; statistical pattern recognition; theoretical pattern recognition; and video analysis.