Cooperative processes are widespread in physical and biological systems -- their elements may be pixels in a digital image, neurons in the central nervous system, or atoms in a solid lattice. This book presents a theory of cooperative computation as applied to perceptual inferencing problems. It explores such problems as the integration of multiple sensory information (multi-user fusion), figure-ground segregation, the segmentation of visual images, attention, the self-organization of feature-detecting neurons and short-term synaptic plasticity.