The 12th Portuguese Conference on Pattern Recognition — RecPad2002, was organized by the Departamento de Electrónica e Telecomunicações and Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática of the Universidade de Aveiro. It is the third time that RecPad is held in Aveiro; the first one was in 1991 and the second in 1995.
RecPad is devoted to all areas of Pattern Recognition and covers theoretical aspects as well as applications. Submissions, in this edition, as in the previous ones, were encourage in the following areas (among others): Pattern Recognition, Image and Signal Processing, Image and Video Coding and Compression, Computer Vision, Industrial and Medical Applications and Neural Networks.
The 79 received contributions were referred by, at least, two members of the Program Committee. Out of these, 26 were included in the program as long papers and 37 as short papers. These papers were included in the Proceedings (in CDROM) and their abstracts in the Book of Abstracts, and have been organized in 11 sessions. RecPad2002 had the participation of authors from 13 different countries.