this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th international conference on image analysis and recognition, iciar 2009, held in halifax, canada, in july 2009. the 93 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 164 submissions. the papers are organized in topical sections on image and video processing and analysis; image segmentation; image and video retrieval and indexing; pattern analysis and recognition; biometrics face recognition; shape analysis; motion analysis and tracking; 3d image analysis; biomedical image analysis; document analysis and applications.