The present volume contains the contributions delivered at the 5th International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications (WILF 2003), hosted by the Istituto Italiano Studi Filoso?ci, Palazzo Serra di Cassano, Naples (Italy) and held on October 9-11, 2003. The volume includes the more recent achievements in the domain of theor- ical, experimental and applied fuzzy logic and related techniques. To emphasize the particular connotation of the modern applications of fuzzy logic, special - tention has been devoted to the recent trend of integrating and complementing fuzzy logic with rough set theory, neural networks, genetic algorithms and other formal theories and methodologies in order to de?ne ?exible and "intelligent" systems, based on the so-called paradigm of soft computing. The capabiblity of these techniques to incorporate imprecision and incomplete information, and to model complex systems, makes them useful tools in many scienti?c areas. Among these areas, WILF 2003 dedicated a Special Session on "Soft Comp- ing in Image Processing." Image processing has been a major topic in many areas of research and development, particularly in computer vision and pattern rec- nition.
The majority of the methods were based on probabilistic paradigms, such as the well-known Bayesian paradigm and evidence-based decision-making s- tems, and just recently soft-computing techniques have gained a relevant role in the leading techniques to tackle image-processing problems. The special session was organized in cooperation with the SCIP group (http://fuzzy.rug.ac.be/SCIP).