Pattern recognition is traditionally considered to cover all aspects of sensory data perception ranging from data acquisition, through preprocessing and low level analysis, to high level interpretation. Owing to its breadth and important application potential, the field of pattern recognition has been attracting considerable attention of researchers in academia and industry and consequently it has been witnessing a rapid growth and perpetual development. The need for dissemination of the latest results is being served by a host of international conferences on pattern recognition. One such series of meetings is regularly held in the United Kingdom under the auspices of the British Pattern Recognition Association. This volume contains papers presented at the BPRA 4th International Conference on Pattern Recognition held in Cambridge, March 28-30, 1988. Alongside the conventional topics of statistical and syntactic pattern recognition, contributions address issues in the hot subject areas of adaptive learning networks, computer vision, knowledge base methods and architectures for pattern processing, and among others, report progress in the application domains of document processing, speech and text recognition and shape analysis for industrial robotics. It is believed that the collection is not merely a report on current activities but that it will also be an important source of inspiration for future developments in the field of pattern recognition.