Award winning papers from the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)

This special issue of Pattern Recognition Letters is based on the awards given at the 19th ICPR organized in Tampa, USA, 8–12 December 2008. This series of conferences started in Washington DC in 1973 as a joint effort of researchers within the domain of computer science that had a special interest in pattern recognition. From 1974 every two years another international conference was held, from 1978 organized by the IAPR, the International Association for Pattern Recognition. The ICPR became very successful as a natural meeting point for the world wide pattern recognition community. In addition to its major activity, the organization of the ICPR, the IAPR established many Technical Committees (at this moment around 20), stimulated various regional and specialised workshops and meetings, and organized a number of prestigious awards. Award winners are invited for special presentations at the ICPR or at one of the many TC sub-conferences. From 1985 Pattern Recognition Letters became an official IAPR publication medium. The award winners of the ICPR 2008 and their contributions reflect the rich variety of researchers, nations and research fields that met in Tampa: starting Ph.D. students, post-docs and established scientists gave presentations ranging from fundamental issues in pattern recognition to reviews over large parts of the field and applications in areas like document analysis, computer vision and medical imaging. We are especially happy that the two winners of the main awards, the King Sun Fu Prize and the J.K. Aggarwal Prize, have been able to submit extensive and significant contributions to this special issue. Anil K. Jain received the King Sun Fu Prize for his outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition. He wrote a comprehensive review of the area of cluster analysis that will be valuable to all researchers that want to extend their research in this field, or are looking for good ways to apply it. The J.K. Aggarwal Prize is for a young scientist who brought a substantial contribution and whose research work has had a major impact on pattern recognition. The 2008 winner was Song-Chun Zhu and he discusses in this issue his fascinating research on learning explicit and implicit visual manifolds.