The international Workshop on "Data Analysis in Astronomy" was in- tended to give a presentation of experiences that have been acqui- red in data analysis and image processing, developments and appli- cations that are steadly growing up in Astronomy. The quality and the quantity of ground and satellite observations require more so- phisticated data analysis methods and better computational tools. The Workshop has reviewed the present state of the art, explored new methods and discussed a wide range of applications. The topics which have been selected have covered the main fields of interest for data analysis in Astronomy. The Workshop has been focused on the methods used and their significant applications. Results which gave a major contribution to the physical interpre- tation of the data have been stressed in the presentations. Atten- tion has been devoted to the description of operational system for data analysis in astronomy. The success of the meeting has been the results of the coordinated effort of several people from the organizers to those who presen- ted a contribution and/or took part in the discussion. We wish to thank the members of the Workshop scientific committee Prof. M. Ca- paccioli, Prof. G.De Biase, Prof. G.Sedmak, Prof. A.Zichichi and of the local organizing committee Dr.R.Buccheri and Dr. M.C.Macca- rone together with Miss P.Savalli and Dr. A.Gabriele of the E.Majo- rana Center for their support and the unvaluable part in arranging the Workshop.

This book contains the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Data Analysis and Processing held in Cefalu' (Palermo, ITALY) on September 23-25 1987. The aim of this Conference, now at its fourth edition, was to give a general view of the actual research in the area of methods and systems for achieving artificial vision as well as to have an up-dated information of the current activity in Europe. A number of invited speakers presented overviews of statistical classification problems and methods, non conventional archi tectures, mathematical morphology, robotic vision, analysis of range images in vision systems, pattern matching algorithms and astronomical data processing. Finally a survey of the discussion on the contribution of AI to Image Analysis is given. The papers presented at the Conference have been subdivided in four sections: knowledge based approaches, basic pattern recognition tools, multi features system based solutions, image analysis-applications. We must thank the IBM-Italia and the Digital Equipment Corpo ration for sponsoring this Conference. We feel that the days spent at Cefalu' were an important step toward the mutual exchange of scientific information within the image processing community. v. Cantoni Pavia University V. Di Gesu' Palermo University S. Levialdi Rome University v CONTENTS INVITED LECTURES . * * * * . * * * 3 Morphological Optics.