I work mostly in image analysis and computer vision, so I have a user point of view but I just love Christopher Bishop's book:

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop, Springer

It is also not too expensive.

For a more classic choice you can always go for:

Pattern Classification, Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart

Hope this helps :)

Pattern Recognition is used in a number of areas like Image Processing,Statistical Pattern Recognition,,for Machine learning,Computer Vision,Data Mining etc.

Generally by Pattern Recognition People mean Image Processing.One good book that is available on line for Image Processing is given below.

http://www.ius.edu.ba/rkoker/cs415/0470404612.pdf

IMAGE PROCESSING

AND PATTERN

RECOGNITION

Fundamentals and Techniques

FRANK Y. SHIH

John Wyley &sons,Inc

P.S.

I work mostly in image analysis and computer vision, so I have a user point of view but I just love Christopher Bishop's book:

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop, Springer

It is also not too expensive.

For a more classic choice you can always go for:

Pattern Classification, Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart

Hope this helps :)

I'm a graduate student and I had machine learning and Pattern recognition course.

I think these two course are dependent to each other. so the following book is my choice:

- C. M. Bishop, "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning", 2006.

- R. O. Duda, P. E. Hart, and D. G. Stork, "Pattern Classification", John Wiley & Sons, 2000.

- Machine Learning, T. Mitchell, MIT Press,1998.

I would prefer some part of each book separately.

The most important one is Bishop, but this book is really hard and need a lot of practice for student to learn.

I would recommend "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop, 2007". I recently bought this book and found it clear and covering wide aspects of recognition and classification techniques. Statistical and neural networks classification techniques are well explained. Other books like “Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning, David Barber, 2012”, which I also bought and found it interesting too. But it focus more onto statistical and flow graph methods.

I would recommend the book "Introduction to Machine Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)" By Ethem Alpaydin and the first three chapters of "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher M. Bishop to start with. Finally for more advanced and deeper knowledge of the subject Bishop's book serves as the most valuable resource.

Hi. I completely agree with Pedro. I'm a PhD Student and I started by reading the Bishop and the Duda-Hart. I found them enough simple for a beginner, but also very interesting and fascinating.

Hello,

As a student, I believe that each text book has its own strengths and weaknesses, dependent on authors' research concerns and interests. Our main reference for pattern recognition (PR) course was "Pattern Classification by Duda", but whenever I tried to study a part of that, I felt that the explanations are not sufficient in some sections and topics and I need another complementary source. However, I think this book is easier than others to begin PR learning.

Yours,

As a student, the Duda Hart Stork book was very good, and it was my first PR book. Even today, I'll occasionally refer back to it, especially when referencing prior work in a literature review for a paper I'm writing.

I think Bishop's book is a good one:

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop

From my point of view, I think "Applied Pattern Recognition", by Paulus and Hornegger is one of the best books in that field.

I think Duda and Hart book is the best choice for starting this filed.

if you would like to see the practical application of its method,fortunately it exist a book which implement Duda and Hart methods in Matlab. After being professional you can use other books like Webb and Bishop books.

My top-4 of machine learning and pattern recognition books:

Which book is of interest to you really depends on your mathematics skills and background. I posted a review of these books on http://www.visiondummy.com/machine-learning-books/

Dear Pedro, 

I would express my point of view as a student, since I just finished my PhD.

I prefer the Duda 

This is a good question.

I rank Duda as no. 1 on my list of pattern recognition books.

One more thing not mentioned so far is the contribution made by past Ph.D. dissertations, which are usually available online.    See, for example,

S. De Backer, Unsupervised Pattern Recognition, Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit Antwerpen, 2002:

http://webh01.ua.ac.be/visielab/theses/debacker/SteveThesis.pdf

This thesis considers dimensionality reduction both for supervised Pattern Recognition and Classification (Section 1.2.1, 1.3.1, starting on page 7) unsupervised Pattern Recognition and Classification, Section 1.2.2 and 1.3.2.    There is also a  thorough treatment of classification in Part II, starting page 61.

Dear Dr Pedro L Galindo; May be the following links will be useful to you Sir,

Regards

https://books.google.co.in/books?id=QgD-3Tcj8DkC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=Basic+Book+for+first+course+in+%22Pattern+Recognition%22&source=bl&ots=lUUBYEarc9&sig=EJqkyDuqBaHCslmGpVLu_ozPFZ0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ROP_VIDHH8Lz8gW7-oHwCQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw

https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEgQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cedar.buffalo.edu%2F~srihari%2FCSE555%2F&ei=ROP_VIDHH8Lz8gW7-oHwCQ&usg=AFQjCNHaF1jUk8uE-_YudvoEceI5WrIeew&sig2=7l2yZef7_s1vgfsHooVA5g&bvm=bv.87611401,d.dGc

hi sir,

these are my ranking list, 

Pattern Classification, Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning - Christopher Bishop

Pattern Recognition and Classification, An Introduction, Geoff Dougherty, Springer