We are proud to present the proceedings of DAGM 2003, and we want to express our appreciation to the many people whose e?orts made this conference such a success. We received about 140 papers from around the world, but we could only acceptabouthalfofthesesubmissionsfororalandposterpresentationssoasnot to overload the agenda. Each paper was assigned three reviewers who followed a careful anonymous selection procedure. The quality of the research paper and its suitability for presentation were the main criteria in this very di?cult selection process.Our32reviewershadatoughjobevaluatingthesepapersand, ofcourse, the job was even tougher whenever contributions were rejected. We thank the reviewers for their time and e?ort. The program committee awarded prizes for the best papers, and we want to sincerely thank the donors. The following three invited papers were among the highlights: - Anil K. Jain (Michigan State University, USA): Who's Who? Challenges in Biometric Authentication - Michael Unser (EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland): Splines and Wavelets: New Perspectives and Opportunities for Pattern Recognition - Bernd Jahne ] (Heidelberg University, Germany): Image Sequence Analysis in Environmental and Life Sciences We are also very grateful and proud that several well-known experts enhanced our conference by o?ering tutorial sessions to our participants: - Christian Perwass, Gerald Sommer (Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, Germany): (Cli?ord) Algebra - Introduction and Applications - Hans-HeinrichBothe (TechnicalUniversityofDenmark, Oersted-DTU): - aptive Paradigms for Pattern Recognition - Peter Kau?, Oliver Schreer (Frauenhofer Institut fur ] Nachrichtentechnik, Heinrich-Hertz-Institute, Berlin, Germany): Concepts, Systems and Al- rithms for Immersive Video Communication - Michael Felsberg (Link] oping University, Sweden): Systematic Approaches to