On Some Scientific Results of the ICPR-2020

This special issue of PRIA is devoted to some scientific results and trends of the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (Virtual, Milano, Italy, January 10–15, 2021). Two important events of ICPR-2020 are represented in this special issue: (1) The paper of Professor Ching Yee Suen (Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada)–the recent winner of IAPR very prestigious K.S. Fu Prize for a year of 2020. The paper based on his lecture “From handwriting to human personality and facial beauty” presented at the ICPR 2020; (2) Special issue “ICPR-2020 Workshop “Image Mining. Theory and Applications.” The analysis of the scientific contribution of IMTA-VII-2021 allows us to draw the following conclusions: (1) The construction of a unified mathematical theory of image analysis is still far from complete. (2) There is considerable interest in the development of new mathematical methods for analyzing and evaluating information presented in the form of images. (3) There is a tendency to expand the mathematical apparatus in the development of new methods of image analysis and recognition by involving in this process areas of mathematics that were not previously used in image analysis. (4) The gap between the capabilities of new mathematical methods of image analysis and recognition and their actual use in solving applied problems remains significant. (5) There is an excessive use of neural networks in solving applied problems of image analysis and image recognition, and quite often without proper justification and interpretation of the results. The special issue includes articles based on the workshop papers selected by the IMTA-VII-2021 Program Committee for publication in PRIA . The PRIA special issue “Scientific Resume of the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition” is prepared by the National Committee for Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the IAPR member society, and by the IAPR Technical Committee no. 16 on Algebraic and Discrete Mathematical Techniques in Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis.