Preface

Last year, the Editorial Board decided to make some change on this journal. As a part of this change, six areas are selected as highlight topics in each issue yearly around. We do hope this change will help readers to choose papers easily. One of the six areas is ``Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition''. From my personal view, this is still too broad to highlight. As a trade-off, we have to focus on a narrow area. We select four papers on the topic of object recognition from 10 submissions. I do not think I can provide more information rather than these papers, and I also do not believe the readers need a guide to read these papers. For these reasons, I only briefly summarize the papers below. ......