This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the bienially held International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns, CAIP 2009, which took place in M?nster, Germany, September 2-4, 2009. The 148 papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 405 submissions. The papers are organized in topical section on: biometrics, calibration, document analysis, features, graph representations, image processing, image registration, image and video retrieval, medical imaging, object and scene recognition, pattern recognition, shape recovery, segmentation, stereo and video analysis, texture analysis, and applications.