It is both an honor and a pleasure to hold the 27th Annual Meeting of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2005, at the Vienna U- versity of Technology, Austria, organized by the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing (PRIP) Group. We received 122 contributions of which we were able to accept 29 as oral presentations and 31 as posters. Each paper received three reviews, upon which decisions were made based on correctness, presentation, technical depth, scienti?c signi?cance and originality. The selection as oral or poster presentation does not signify a quality grading but re?ects attractiveness to the audience which is also re?ected in the order of appearance of papers in these proceedings. The papers are printed in the same order as presented at the symposium and posters are integrated in the corresponding thematic session. In putting these proceedings together, many people played signi?cant roles which we would like to acknowledge. First of all our thanks go to the authors who contributed their work to the symposium. Second, we are grateful for the dedicated work of the 38 members of the Program Committee for their e?ort in evaluating the submitted papers and inprovidingthe necessarydecisionsupport information and the valuable feedback for the authors. Furthermore, the P- gram Committee awarded prizes for the best papers, and we want to sincerely thank the donors. We were honored to have the following three invited speakers at the conf- ence: – Jan P.