This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the two IAPR International Workshops on Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition and on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition, SSPR'98 and SPR'98, held in Sydney, Australia, in August 1998.The book presents 107 revised full papers selected from 134 submissions. Also included are six invited presentations. The papers are organized in topical sections on structural matching and grammatical inference, recognition of 2D and 3D objects, document image analysis and recognition, handwritten character recognition, shape representation and image segmentation, learning methodologies, feature selection and extraction, statistical classification techniques, statistical pattern recognition, and rejection in pattern recognition.