This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, EMMCVPR'97, held in Venice, Italy, in May 1997. The book presents 29 revised full papers selected from a total of 62 submissions. Also included are four full invited papers and a keynote paper by leading researchers. The volume is organized in sections on contours and deformable models, Markov random fields, deterministic methods, object recognition, evolutionary search, structural models, and applications. The volume is the first comprehensive documentation of the application of energy minimization techniques in the areas of compiler vision and pattern recognition.