As the title suggests, this paper surveys developments in the field of statistical pattern recognition. The paper’s other goal is to highlight the impact of the late Professor Fu on the field. It does not make any attempt to be thorough in terms of coverage of the literature, but it does mention the most important subfields of statistical pattern recognition, including statistical theory, feature extraction, contextual information, and cluster analysis. Fundamental information on the progress of the field is well presented, even if some of the referenced papers are a bit eccentric. This paper would be appropriate for an outsider to the field, those involved in casual research, or those wishing to review Fu’s impact on statistical pattern recognition.