Pattern Recognition in Practice VI

This special issue contains most of the papers presented at the conference ``Pattern Recognition in Practice VI'' held on Vlieland, The Netherlands, from 2 to 4 June 1999. The conference was organized as a single-track workshop and was attended by 57 participants from 18 countries. The aim of the conference was to stimulate interaction between pattern recognition professionals and scientists from other disciplines who bring pattern recognition techniques into practice. In previous editions of this conference series, this type of interaction, not only during the formal sessions, but also during the rest of the three days period, has proven to be very valuable and much appreciated by the participants. Apart from the editors, the program committee was composed of: Terry Caelli, Bob Duin, Anil Jain, Laveen Kanal and Padhraic Smyth. They assisted in the selection of papers to be presented. Selection was based on extended abstracts, each abstract being refereed by two committee members. A total of 82 abstracts were received, from which 49 were selected. Of these, 45 were presented at the conference. We express our sincere gratitude to all members of the program committee and, of course, to the authors for their contribution to a successful conference. Rosa Scholte, head of the conference secretariat, gave a most valuable contribution to the organization of the conference. Prior to the conference, she kept track of the registrations, and organized the collective transportation. During the conference days, she coordinated all activities to ensure a smooth running of the conference. In this, during the ®nal months, she was assisted by Astra Scholte. We are most grateful to Rosa and Astra for their dedicated work. As one of the main aims of this conference series is to stimulate interaction between the participants, ample time was devoted to discussions after the presentation of each paper. The discussions were tape recorded and transcribed at the spot. The discussants could then edit the transcriptions. Paul Riem was responsible for the audio-visual equipment. The transcriptions were made by Mieke Bos and Tanya Gelsema. The transcription and correction process was supervised by Guus Beckers, Jan Grashuis and Jifke Veenland. This whole scienti®c, technical and administrative sta€ worked together in an ecient and friendly atmosphere. Our sincere thanks go to the entire sta€. The twelve sessions of the conference and the number of papers in each of them, as they appear in these Proceedings are as follows: Pattern Recognition Letters 20 (1999) 1073±1078 www.elsevier.nl/locate/patrec