Pattern recognition

Pattern recognition (also known as classification or pattern classification) is a field within the area of computer science and can be defined as "the act of taking in raw data and taking an action based on the category of the data" [1]. It uses methods from statistics, machine learning and other areas.

Typical applications are automatic speech recognition, classification of text into several categories (e.g. spam/non-spam email messages), the automatic recognition of handwritten postal codes on postal envelopes, or the automatic recognition of images of human faces. The last two examples form the subtopic image analysis of pattern recognition that deals with digital images as input to pattern recognition systems.

See also:

• artificial intelligence
• computer vision
• machine vision
• optical character recognition
• machine learning
• barcode
• information retrieval