This edited volume addresses a subject which has been discussed inten sively in the computer vision community for several years. Performance characterization and evaluation of computer vision algorithms are of key importance, particularly with respect to the configuration of reliable and ro bust computer vision systems as well as the dissemination of reconfigurable systems in novel application domains. Although a plethora of literature on this subject is available for certain' areas of computer vision, the re search community still faces a lack of a well-grounded, generally accepted, and--eventually-standardized methods. The range of fundamental problems encoIl!passes the value of synthetic images in experimental computer vision, the selection of a representative set of real images related to specific domains and tasks, the definition of ground truth given different tasks and applications, the design of experimental test beds, the analysis of algorithms with respect to general characteristics such as complexity, resource consumption, convergence, stability, or range of admissible input data, the definition and analysis of performance measures for classes of algorithms, the role of statistics-based performance measures, the generation of data sheets with performance measures of algorithms sup porting the system engineer in his configuration problem, and the validity of model assumptions for specific applications of computer vision.