This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 42nd German Conference on Pattern Recognition, DAGM GCPR 2020, which took place during September 28 until October 1, 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Tubingen, Germany, but had to change to an online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic.The 34 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 89 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Normalizing Flow, Semantics, Physics, Camera Calibration and Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning.