This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2003, held in Havana, Cuba, in November 2003.The 82 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. All current issues in pattern recognition, image processing, and computer vision are addressed as well as applications in domains like robotics, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, speech processing, data analysis, document recognition, etc.