There have been various developments in shape analysis in the last decade. We describe here some relationships of shape analysis with directional statistics. For shape, rotations are to be integrated out or to be optimized over whilst they are the basis for directional statistics. However, various concepts are connected. In particular, certain distributions of directional statistics have emerged in shape analysis, such a distribution is Complex Bingham Distribution. This paper first gives some background to shape analysis and then it goes on to directional distributions and their applications to shape analysis. Note that the idea of using tangent space for analysis is common to both manifold as well. 1 Introduction Consider shapes of configurations of points in Euclidean space. There are various contexts in which k labelled points (or "landmarks") x 1 ; :::; x k in IR m are given and interest is in the shape of (x 1 ; :::; x k ). Example 1 The microscopic fossil Globorotalia truncat...

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We describe a method for automatically building statistical shape models from a training set of exam- ple boundaries / surfaces. These models show considerable promise as a basis for segmenting and interpreting images. One of the drawbacks of the approach is, however, the need to establish a set of dense correspondences between all members of a set of training shapes. Often this is achieved by locating a set of qandmarks manually on each training image, which is time-consuming and subjective in 2D, and almost impossible in 3D. We describe how shape models can be built automatically by posing the correspondence problem as one of finding the parameterization for each shape in the training set. We select the set of parameterizations that build the best model. We define best as that which min- imizes the description length of the training set, arguing that this leads to models with good compactness, specificity and generalization ability. We show how a set of shape parameterizations can be represented and manipulated in order to build a minimum description length model. Results are given for several different training sets of 2D boundaries, showing that the proposed method constructs better models than other approaches including manual landmarking - the current gold standard. We also show that the method can be extended straightforwardly to 3D.

The shape variation displayed by a class of objects can be represented as a probability density function, allowing us to determine plausible and implausible examples of the class. Given a training set of example shapes we can align them into a common co-ordinate frame and use kernel based density estimation techniques to represent this distribution. Such an estimate is complex and expensive, so we generate a simpler approximation using a mixture of gaussians. We show how to calculate the distribution, and how it can be used in image search to locate examples of the modelled object in new images.

Statistical models of shape and appearance are powerful tools for interpreting medical images. We assume a training set of images in which corresponding `landmark' points have been marked on every image. From this data we can compute a statistical model of the shape variation, a model of the texture variation and a model of the correlations between shape and texture. With enough training examples such models should be able to synthesize any image of normal anatomy. By finding the parameters which optimize the match between a synthesized model image and a target image we can locate all the structures represented by the model. Two approaches to the matching will be described. The Active Shape Model essentially matches a model to boundaries in an image. The Active Appearance Model finds model parameters which synthesize a complete image which is as similar as possible to the target image. By using a `difference decomposition' approach the current difference between target image and synthesi...

A primary goal of statistical shape analysis is to describe the variability of a population of geometric objects. A standard technique for computing such descriptions is principal component analysis. However, principal component analysis is limited in that it only works for data lying in a Euclidean vector space. While this is certainly sufficient for geometric models that are parameterized by a set of landmarks or a dense collection of boundary points, it does not handle more complex representations of shape. We have been developing representations of geometry based on the medial axis description or m-rep. While the medial representation provides a rich language for variability in terms of bending, twisting, and widening, the medial parameters are not elements of a Euclidean vector space. They are in fact elements of a nonlinear Riemannian symmetric space. In this paper, we develop the method of principal geodesic analysis, a generalization of principal component analysis to the manifold setting. We demonstrate its use in describing the variability of medially-defined anatomical objects. Results of applying this framework on a population of hippocampi in a schizophrenia study are presented.

We describe some techniques that can be used to represent and detect deformable shapes in images. The main di#culty with deformable template models is the very large or infinite number of possible non-rigid transformations of the templates. This makes the problem of finding an optimal match of a deformable template to an image incredibly hard. Using a new representation for deformable shapes we show how to e#ciently find a global optimal solution to the non-rigid matching problem. The representation is based on the description of objects using triangulated polygons. Our matching algorithm can minimize a large class of energy functions, making it applicable to a wide range of problems. We present experimental results of detecting shapes in medical images and images of natural scenes. Our method does not depend on initialization and is very robust, yielding good matches even in images with high clutter.

This paper reports a novel method for fully automated segmentation that is based on description of shape and its variation using Point Distribution Models (PDM). An improvement of the Active Shape procedure introduced by Cootes and Taylor to find new examples of previously learned shapes using PDMs is presented. The new method for segmentation and interpretation of deep neuroanatomic structures such as thalamus, putamen, ventricular system, etc. incorporates a priori knowledge about shapes of the neuroanatomic structures to provide their robust segmentation and labeling in MR brain images. The method was trained in 8 MR brain images and tested in 19 brain images by comparison to observer-defined independent standards. Neuroanatomic structures in all testing images were successfully identified. Computer-identified and observer-defined neuroanatomic structures agreed well. The average labeling error was 7 \Sigma 3%. Border positioning errors were quite small, with the average border posi...

. The problem of matching shapes parameterized as a set of points is frequently encountered in medical imaging tasks. When the point-sets are derived from landmarks, there is usually no problem of determining the correspondences or homologies between the two sets of landmarks. However, when the point sets are automatically derived from images, the difficult problem of establishing correspondence and rejecting non-homologies as outliers remains. The Procrustes method is a well-known method of shape comparison and can always be pressed into service when homologies between point-sets are known in advance. This paper presents a powerful extension of the Procrustes method to pointsets of differing point counts with correspondences unknown. The result is the softassign Procrustes matching algorithm which iteratively establishes correspondence, rejects non-homologies as outliers, determines the Procrustes rescaling and the spatial mapping between the point-sets. 1 Introduction One of the mos...

Biomedical images usually contain complex objects, which will vary in appearance significantly from one image to another. Attempting to measure or detect