This book contains the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Data Analysis and Processing held in Cefalu' (Palermo, ITALY) on September 23-25 1987. The aim of this Conference, now at its fourth edition, was to give a general view of the actual research in the area of methods and systems for achieving artificial vision as well as to have an up-dated information of the current activity in Europe. A number of invited speakers presented overviews of statistical classification problems and methods, non conventional archi­ tectures, mathematical morphology, robotic vision, analysis of range images in vision systems, pattern matching algorithms and astronomical data processing. Finally a survey of the discussion on the contribution of AI to Image Analysis is given. The papers presented at the Conference have been subdivided in four sections: knowledge based approaches, basic pattern recognition tools, multi features system based solutions, image analysis-applications. We must thank the IBM-Italia and the Digital Equipment Corpo­ ration for sponsoring this Conference. We feel that the days spent at Cefalu' were an important step toward the mutual exchange of scientific information within the image processing community. v. Cantoni Pavia University V. Di Gesu' Palermo University S. Levialdi Rome University v CONTENTS INVITED LECTURES . • • • • . • • • 3 Morphological Optics.