this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th international workshop on structural and syntctic pattern recognition, sspr 2002 and the 4th international workshop on statistical techniques in pattern recognition, spr 2002 held jointly in windsor, ontario, canada in august 2002.the 45 revised full papers and 35 poster papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 116 submissions. the papers are organized in topical sections on graphs, grammars, and languages; graphs, strings, and grammars; documents and ocr; image shape analysis and application; density estimation and distribution models; multi classifiers and fusion; feature extraction and selection; general methodology; and image shape analysis and application.