Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computer science which aims at creating intelligent machines, where an intelligent machine is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. Automatic (machine) recognition, description, classification, and grouping of patterns are important problems in a variety of engineering and scientific disciplines such as biology, psychology, medicine, marketing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing. But what is a pattern? Watanabe defines a pattern as opposite of a chaos; it is an entity, vaguely defined, that could be given a name. For example, a pattern could be a fingerprint image, a handwritten cursive word, a human face, or a speech signal.

Pattern recognition is the study of how machines can observe the environment, learn to distinguish patterns of interest from their background, and make sound and reasonable decisions about the categories of the patterns. Given a pattern, its recognition/classification may consist of one of the following two tasks :-

1) supervised classification (e.g., discriminant analysis) in which the input pattern is identified as a member of a predefined class,

2) unsupervised classification (e.g., clustering) in which the pattern is assigned to a hitherto unknown class.

An important point to note here is that the recognition problem here is being posed as a classification or categorization task, where the classes are either defined by the system designer (in supervised classification) or are learned based on the similarity of patterns (in unsupervised classification).

Interest in the area of pattern recognition has been renewed recently due to emerging applications which are not only challenging but also computationally more demanding . These applications include data mining (identifying a pattern, e.g., correlation, or an outlier in millions of multidimensional patterns), document classification (efficiently searching text documents), financial forecasting, organization and retrieval of multimedia databases, and biometrics (personal identification based on various physical attributes such as face and fingerprints).

So to say my dear friends the field of pattern recognition is so vast that I'm unable to mention every thing here.Moreover I,myself, is working on a part of it that is face,iris and fingerprint recognition.

I will post more information on these topics in my next articles.

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Regards.

Karan Kumar Jaiswal