This book is part of the refereed 2-volume proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, ICIAP'97, held in Florence, Italy, September 1997. Both volumes together present several keynote contributions and 173 revised papers selected from over 300 submissions. The contributing authors (more than 400 in number) provide a wealth of new results in the areas of image analysis, pattern recognition and computer vision. Among the basic topics covered are image enhancement, image segmentation, image compression, motion analysis, object recognition, image understanding, and special hardware architectures and systems, etc. Among the application areas covered are biomedical imaging, character recognition, safety and surveillance, object identification, etc.