Pattern Analysis — Heinrich Niemann, 1981 First Edition | Early Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition

Published in 1981, Heinrich Niemann’s Pattern Analysis is an early technical treatment of a field that now sits at the center of computer vision, speech recognition, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Niemann defines pattern analysis as the automatic construction of a symbolic description from complex inputs such as images and connected speech—in effect, the problem of teaching computers to transform raw sensor data into recognizable objects, structures, and meanings. The book treats pattern recognition as an integrated computational system rather than merely a classification problem.

Its coverage is strikingly broad for 1981, including image preprocessing, filtering, segmentation, template matching, statistical and nonparametric classification, learning, data structures, search strategies, heuristic methods, knowledge representation, production systems, semantic networks, grammars, and speech and image analysis.

Seen from today, the book documents a particularly interesting stage in the development of AI: computers were increasingly being asked not simply to calculate, but to interpret. Many of the problems discussed here—feature extraction, image segmentation, classification, representation of knowledge, and automatic understanding—remain fundamental to modern machine-learning systems, although the techniques used to solve them have changed dramatically.

This is the original 1981 edition; Springer later substantially revised and expanded the work into Pattern Analysis and Understanding in 1990.

Author: Heinrich Niemann
Title: Pattern Analysis
Series: Springer Series in Information Sciences, Volume 4
Publisher: Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York
Year: 1981
Edition: First Edition
Format: Hardcover
Pages: xiii + 302 pages
Illustrations: 112 figures
ISBN: 0-387-10792-4 / 3-540-10792-4
LCCN: 81-09052

Condition:
Vintage hardcover in good used condition. Bright orange publisher’s boards show light general shelf wear, with minor rubbing and bumping at the corners and edges. Former institutional/library copy with call-number label on the lower front cover and handwritten classification notation on the title page. Interior appears clean and well preserved. Binding appears sound. See photographs for exact condition.