Soft computing is a consortium of methodologies which work synergetically and provides in one form or another flexible information processing capabilities for handling real life ambiguous situations. Its aim is to exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, approximate reasoning, and partial truth in order to achieve tractability, robustness, low cost solution and close resemblance with human like decision making. The relevance of soft computing for pattern recognition and image processing is already established during the last few years. The subject has recently matured because of its potential applications in problems like remotely sensed data analysis, global positioning systems, medical imaging, optical character recognition, signature verification, multimedia, target recognition, face recognition and man machine communication. Many books, edited volumes, special issues of journals are now available. It may be mentioned that soft computing is the key component of the recently proposed (by Zadeh) computational theory of perception (CTP) which may be considered to be the realistic framework for developing the future generation computing systems.
The objective of this summer school is to provide an opportunity to the researchers, students, teachers and R&D personnel to be acquainted with the emerging soft computing techniques of machine intelligence starting from introduction to various real live applications. Particular attention will be given on applying these tools to various pattern recognition/image processing problems. The school will also give an opportunity to the young researchers to have interaction/establish contacts with well known senior researchers of the field.