STATISTICAL PATTERN RECOGNITION — EARLY DEVELOPMENT AND RECENT PROGRESS

The area of statistical pattern recognition has experienced about three decades of continued progress. In this paper, early development of the area is examined by reviewing the activities of the first decade. Recent progress in major topics of statistical pattern recognition including classification rules, feature extraction, contextual analysis and cluster analysis, are then reviewed. Particular notes are made on the important contributions of the late Prof. Fu, which have profound impact on the development of statistical pattern recognition. The future outlook of the area is indeed bright as many applications making use of statistical pattern recognition are explored to seek more reliable recognition performance. Efforts on efficient hardware implementation and less costly recognition software packages as well as the combined statistical-structural approach are also likely to increase significantly.