First of all, let's give a tentative answer to the following question: what is pattern recognition (PR)? Among all the possible existing answers, that which we consider being the best adapted to the situation and to the concern of this chapter is: "pattern recognition is the scientific discipline of machine learning (or artificial intelligence) that aims at classifying data (patterns) into a number of categories or classes". But what is a pattern? A pattern recognition system (PRS) is an automatic system that aims at classifying the input pattern into a specific class. It proceeds into two successive tasks: (1) the analysis (or description) that extracts the characteristics from the pattern being studied and (2) the classification (or recognition) that enables us to recognise an object (or a pattern) by using some characteristics derived from the first task.