this book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of the 8th international workshop on structural and syntactic pattern recognition and the 3rd international workshop on statistical techniques in pattern recognition, sspr 2000 and spr 2000, held in alicante, spain in august/september 2000. the 52 revised full papers presented together with five invited papers and 35 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 130 submissions. the book offers topical sections on hybrid and combined methods, document image analysis, grammar and language methods, structural matching, graph-based methods, shape analysis, clustering and density estimation, object recognition, general methodology, and feature extraction and selection.