Elastic Shape Analysis of Three-Dimensional Objects

Statistical analysis of shapes of 3D objects is an important problem with a wide range of applications. This analysis is difficult for many reasons, including the fact that objects differ in both geometry and topology. In this manuscript, we narrow the problem by focusing on objects with fixed topology, say objects that are diffeomorphic to unit spheres, and develop tools for analyzing their geometries. The main challenges in this problem are to register points across objects and to perform...