This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Advances in Pattern Recognition, ICAPR 2001, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in March 2001. The 40 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers and two tutorial presentations were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The book is organized in topical sections on neural networks and computational intelligence, character recognition and document analysis, feature selection and analysis, pattern recognition and classification, image and signal processing applications, and image feature analysis and retrieval.