this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the first international workshop on machine learning and data mining in pattern recognition, mldm99, held in leipzig, germany in september 1999. the 15 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed. the papers are organized in sections on neural networks applied to image processing and recognition, learning in image pre-processing and segmentation, image retrieval, classification and image interpretation, symbolic learning and neural networks in document processing, and data mining.