The two-volume set LNCS 8258 and 8259 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2013, held in Havana, Cuba, in November 2013. The 137 papers presented, together with two keynotes, were carefully reviewed and selected from 262 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mathematical theory of PR, supervised and unsupervised classification, feature or instance selection for classification, image analysis and retrieval, signals analysis and processing, applications of pattern recognition, biometrics, video analysis, and data mining.