1 Thisbook contains refereed and improved papers presented at the 5th IAPR - ternational Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC 2003). GREC 2003 was held in the Computer Vision Center, in Barcelona (Spain) during July 30–31, 2003. The GREC workshop is the mainactivity of the IAPR-TC10, the Technical 2 Committee on Graphics Recognition . Edited volumes from the previous wo- shops in the series are available as Lecture Notes in Computer Science: LNCS Volume 1072 (GREC 1995 at Penn State University, USA), LNCS Volume 1389 (GREC 1997 in Nancy, France), LNCS Volume 1941 (GREC 1999 in Jaipur, India), and LNCS Volume 2390 (GREC 2001 in Kingston, Canada). Graphics recognition is a particular field in the domain of document ana- sis that combines pattern recognition and image processing techniques for the analysis of any kind of graphical information in documents, either from paper or electronic formats. Topics of interest for the graphics recognition community are: vectorization; symbol recognition; analysis of graphic documents with - agrammatic notation like electrical diagrams, architectural plans, engineering drawings, musical scores, maps, etc. ; graphics-based information retrieval; performance evaluation in graphics recognition; and systems for graphics recog- tion. In addition to the classic objectives, in recent years graphics recognition has faced up to new and promising perspectives, some of them in conjunction with other, affine scientific communities. Examples of that are sketchy interfaces and on-line graphics recognition in the framework of human computer interaction, or query by graphic content for retrieval and browsing in large-format graphic d- uments, digital libraries and Web applications. Thus, the combination of classic challenges with new research interests gives the graphicsrecognition field an active scientific community, with a promising future.