This monograph is intended to cover several major applications of pattern recognition. After a brief introduction to pattern recognition in Chapter 1, the two major approaches, statistical approach and syntactic approach, are reviewed in Chapter 2, and 3, respectively. Other topics include the application of pattern recognition to seismic wave interpretation, to system reliability problems, to medical data analysis, as well as character and speech recognition.

It has been recognized for a long time that a conventional sequential processor is inefficient for operations on pictorial data where relatively simple operations need to be performed on a large number of data elements (pixels). Though many parallel processing architectures for picture processing have been proposed in the past, very few have actually been implemented due to the costs involved. With LSI technology, it is becoming possible to realize parallel architectures at a modest cost. In the following the authors review some of the proposed architectures for pattern recognition and image processing.

This book contains the Proceedings of the US-Japan Seminar on Learning Process in Control Systems. The seminar, held in Nagoya, Japan, from August 18 to 20, 1970, was sponsored by the US-Japan Cooperative Science Program, jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The full texts of all the presented papers except two t are included. The papers cover a great variety of topics related to learning processes and systems, ranging from pattern recognition to systems identification, from learning control to biological modelling. In order to reflect the actual content of the book, the present title was selected. All the twenty-eight papers are roughly divided into two parts--Pattern Recognition and System Identification and Learning Process and Learning Control. It is sometimes quite obvious that some papers can be classified into either part. The choice in these cases was strictly the editor's in order to keep a certain balance between the two parts. During the past decade there has been a considerable growth of interest in problems of pattern recognition and machine learn ing. In designing an optimal pattern recognition or control system, if all the a priori information about the process under study is known and can be described deterministically, the optimal system is usually designed by deterministic optimization techniques."