It is indeed a great pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis (IWCIA 2008) held in Bu?alo, NY, April 7-9, 2008. Image analysis is a scienti?c discipline providing theoretical foundations and methods for solving problems that appear in various areas of human practice, as diverseas medicine, robotics, defense, andsecurity.As a rule, the processeddata are discrete; thus, the "discrete," or "combinatorial"approachto image analysis appears to be a natural one and therefore its importance is increasing. In fact, combinatorial image analysis often provides various advantages (in terms of - ciency and accuracy) over the more traditional approaches based on continuous models requiring numeric computation. The IWCIA workshop series provides a forum for researchers throughout the world to present cutting-edge results in combinatorial image analysis, to discuss recent advances in this research ?eld, and to promote interaction with researchersfromothercountries.Infact, IWCIA2008retainedandevenenriched the international spirit of these workshops, that had successful prior meetings in Paris (France) 1991, Ube (Japan) 1992, Washington DC (USA) 1994, Lyon (France) 1995, Hiroshima (Japan) 1997, Madras (India) 1999, Caen (France) 2000, Philadelphia (USA) 2001, Palermo (Italy) 2003, Auckland (New Zealand) 2004, and Berlin (Germany) 2006. The IWCIA 2008 Program Committee was highly international as its members are renowned experts coming from 23 di?- entcountries, andsubmissionscamefrom24countriesfromAfrica, Asia, Europe, North and South America.