This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2008, held in Havana, Cuba, in September 2008. The 93 revised full papers presented together with 3 keynote articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 182 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on signal analysis for characterization and filtering, analysis of shape and texture, analysis of speech and language, data mining, clustering of images and documents, statistical pattern recognition, classification and description of objects, classification and edition, geometric image analysis, neural networks, computer vision, image coding, associative memories and neural networks, interpolation and video tracking, images analysis, music and speech analysis, as well as classifier combination and document filtering.