PATTERN RECOGNITION

Pattern recognition, wherein a sequence of feature vectors is formed from a digitized incoming signal, the feature vectors comprising feature vector components, and at least one feature vector is compared with templates of candidate patterns by computing a distortion measure. A control signal based on at least one time-dependent variable of the recognition process is formulated, and the distortion measure is computed using only a subset of the vector components of the feature vector, the subset being chosen in accordance with said control signal. This reduces the computational complexity of the computation, as the dimensionality of the vectors involved in the computation is effectively reduced. Although such a dimension reduction decreases the computational need, it has been found not to significantly impair the classification performance.