Statistical shape analysis is a geometrical analysis from a set of shapes in which statistics are measured to describe geometrical properties from similar shapes or different groups, for instance, the difference between male and female Gorilla skull shapes, normal and pathological bone shapes, etc. Some of the important aspects of shape analysis are to obtain a measure of distance between shapes, to estimate average shapes from a (possibly random) sample and to estimate shape variability in a sample 1]. One of the main methods used is principal component analysis. Specific applications of...

This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests. The models are simple to understand and interpret and provide a useful tool to describe the global dynamics of the landmark configurations. However, because of the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, distributions in shape spaces are not straightforward to obtain.

The book explores the use of the Gaussian distribution in the configuration space, with similarity transformations integrated out....