Found. Comput. Math. 1–58 (2005) © 2004 SFoCM FOUNDATIONS OF DOI: 10.1007/s10208-003-0094-x COMPUTATIONAL MATHEMATICS The Journal of the Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics Approximations of Shape Metrics and Application to Shape Warping and Empirical Shape Statistics Guillaume Charpiat,1 Olivier Faugeras,2 and Renaud Keriven1,3 1Odyss´ee Laboratory ENS 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris, France
[email protected] 2Odyss´ee Laboratory INRIA Sophia Antipolis 2004 route des Lucioles, BP 93 06902 Sophia-Antipolis Cedex, France
[email protected] 3Odyss´ee Laboratory ENPC 6 av Blaise Pascal 77455 Marne la Vall´ee, France
[email protected] Abstract. This paper proposes a framework for dealing with several problems re- lated to the analysis of shapes. Two related such problems are the definition of the relevant set of shapes and that of defining a metric on it. Following a recent research monograph by Delfour and Zol´esio [11], we consider the characteristic functions of the subsets of R2 and their distance functions. The L2 norm of the difference of characteristic functions, the L∞ and the W 1,2 norms of the difference of distance functions define interesting topologies, in particular the well-known Hausdorff dis- tance. Because of practical considerations arising from the fact that we deal with Date received: May 7, 2003. Final version received: March 18, 2004. Date accepted: March 24, 2004. Communicated by Peter Olver. Online publication: July 6, 2004. AMS classification: 35Q80, 49Q10, 60D05, 62P30, 68T45. Key words and phrases: Shape metrics, Characteristic functions, Distance functions, Deformation flows, Lower semicontinuous envelope, Shape warping, Empirical mean shape, Empirical covariance operator, Principal modes of variation.