This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2004, held in Puebla, Mexico in October 2004. The 87 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 158 submissions. All current issues in pattern recognition, image analysis, and computer vision are addressed including applications in areas like robotics, entertainment, space exploration, data mining, document analysis, and natural language processing.