The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) has established itself as a major event in this exciting and very active field of research and development. These refereed two-volume proceedings include the 123 papers accepted for presentation at the 4th ECCV, held in Cambridge, UK, in April 1996; these papers were selected from a total of 328 submissions and together give a well-balanced reflection of the state of the art in computer vision. The papers in volume I are grouped in sections on structure from motion; recognition; geometry and stereo; texture and features; tracking; grouping and segmentation; stereo; and recognition, matching, and segmentation.