Pattern Theory provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the modern challenges in signal, data, and pattern analysis in speech recognition, computational linguistics, image analysis and computer vision. Aimed at graduate students in biomedical engineering, mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering with a good background in mathematics and probability, the text includes numerous exercises and an extensive bibliography. Additional resources including extended proofs, selected solutions and examples are available on a companion website.
The book commences with a short overview of pattern theory and the basics of statistics and estimation theory. Chapters 3-6 discuss the role of representation of patterns via condition structure. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the second central component of pattern theory: groups of geometric transformation applied to the representation of geometric objects. Chapter 9 moves into probabilistic structures in the continuum, studying random processes and random fields indexed over subsets of Rn. Chapters 10 and 11 continue with transformations and patterns indexed over the continuum. Chapters 12-14 extend from the pure representations of shapes to the Bayes estimation of shapes and their parametric representation. Chapters 15 and 16 study the estimation of infinite dimensional shape in the newly emergent field of Computational Anatomy. Finally, Chapters 17 and 18 look at inference, exploring random sampling approaches for estimation of model order and parametric representing of shapes.

This book is a revision of Random Point Processes written by D. L. Snyder and published by John Wiley and Sons in 1975. More emphasis is given to point processes on multidimensional spaces, especially to pro cesses in two dimensions. This reflects the tremendous increase that has taken place in the use of point-process models for the description of data from which images of objects of interest are formed in a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. A new chapter, Translated Poisson Processes, has been added, and several of the chapters of the fIrst edition have been modifIed to accommodate this new material. Some parts of the fIrst edition have been deleted to make room. Chapter 7 of the fIrst edition, which was about general marked point-processes, has been eliminated, but much of the material appears elsewhere in the new text. With some re luctance, we concluded it necessary to eliminate the topic of hypothesis testing for point-process models. Much of the material of the fIrst edition was motivated by the use of point-process models in applications at the Biomedical Computer Labo ratory of Washington University, as is evident from the following excerpt from the Preface to the first edition. "It was Jerome R. Cox, Jr. , founder and [1974] director of Washington University's Biomedical Computer Laboratory, who ftrst interested me [D. L. S.