This volume contains all papers presented at SSPR 2004 and SPR 2004, hosted by the Instituto de Telecomunicac" ,oes/Instituto Superior T' ecnico, Lisbon, Portugal, August 18-20, 2004. This was the fourth time that the two workshops were held back-to-back. The SSPR was the tenth International Workshop on Structural and Synt- tic Pattern Recognition, and the SPR was the ?fth International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition. These workshops have traditi- ally been held in conjunction with ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition), and are the major events for technical committees TC2 and TC1, respectively, of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The workshops were closely coordinated, being held in parallel, with plenary talks and a common session on hybrid systems. This was an attempt to resolve thedilemmaofhowto dealwiththeneedfornarrow-focusspecializedworkshops yet accommodate the presentation of new theories and techniques that blur the distinction between the statistical and the structural approaches. A total of 219 papers were received from many countries, with the subm- sion and reviewing processes being carried out separately for each workshop. A total of 59 papers were accepted for oral presentation and 64 for posters. In - dition, four invited speakers presented informative talks and overviews of their research. They were: Alberto Sanfeliu, from the Technical University of Cata- nia, Spain; Marco Gori, from the University of Siena, Italy; Nello Cristianini, from the University of California, USA; and Erkki Oja, from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, winner of the 2004 Pierre Devijver Award.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Structural and Syntctic Pattern Recognition, SSPR 2002 and the 4th International Workshop on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SPR 2002 held jointly in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in August 2002.The 45 revised full papers and 35 poster papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 116 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on graphs, grammars, and languages; graphs, strings, and grammars; documents and OCR; image shape analysis and application; density estimation and distribution models; multi classifiers and fusion; feature extraction and selection; general methodology; and image shape analysis and application.