the volume provides a collection of 21 articles containing new material and describing, in a unified way with extensive real life applications, the merits and significance of performing different image processing/analysis tasks in soft computing paradigm. the articles, written by leading experts all over the world, demonstrate the various ways the fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms and fractals can be used independently and in integrated manner to provide efficient and flexible information processing capabilities in a stronger computational paradigm for handling the tasks like filtering, edge detection, segmentation, compression , classification, motion estimation, character regognition and target identification. application domain includes, among others, data mining, computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, information technology, remote sensing, forensic investigation, video abstraction and knowledge based systems.