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Proliferation of high‐resolution imaging data in recent years has led to substantial improvements in the two popular approaches for analyzing shapes of data objects based on landmarks and/or continuous curves. We provide an expository account of elastic shape analysis of parametric planar curves representing shapes of two‐dimensional (2D) objects by discussing its differences, and its commonalities, to the landmark‐based approach. Particular attention is accorded to the role of reparameterization of a curve, which in addition to rotation, scaling and translation, represents an important shape‐preserving transformation of a curve. The transition to the curve‐based approach moves the mathematical setting of shape analysis from finite‐dimensional non‐Euclidean spaces to infinite‐dimensional ones. We discuss some of the challenges associated with the infinite‐dimensionality of the shape space, and illustrate the use of geometry‐based methods in the computation of intrinsic statistical summaries and in the definition of statistical models on a 2D imaging dataset consisting of mouse vertebrae. We conclude with an overview of the current state‐of‐the‐art in the field.

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Image and Spatial Data < Data: Types and Structure

Computational Mathematics < Applications of Computational Statistics

 

In this work, we develop a new set of Bayesian models to perform registration of real-valued functions. A Gaussian process prior is assigned to the parameter space of time warping functions, and a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is utilized to explore the posterior distribution. While the proposed model can be defined on the infinite-dimensional function space in theory, dimension reduction is needed in practice because one cannot store an infinite-dimensional function on the computer. Existing Bayesian models often rely on some pre-specified, fixed truncation rule to achieve dimension reduction, either by fixing the grid size or the number of basis functions used to represent a functional object. In comparison, the new models in this paper randomize the truncation rule. Benefits of the new models include the ability to make inference on the smoothness of the functional parameters, a data-informative feature of the truncation rule, and the flexibility to control the amount of shape-alteration in the registration process. For instance, using both simulated and real data, we show that when the observed functions exhibit more local features, the posterior distribution on the warping functions automatically concentrates on a larger number of basis functions. Supporting materials including code and data to perform registration and reproduce some of the results presented herein are available online. 

Tomography is a widely used tool for analyzing microstructures in three dimensions (3D). The analysis, however, faces difficulty because the constituent materials produce similar grey-scale values. Sometimes, this prompts the image segmentation process to assign a pixel/voxel to the wrong phase (active material or pore). Consequently, errors are introduced in the microstructure characteristics calculation. In this work, we develop a filtering algorithm called PerSplat based on topological persistence (a technique used in topological data analysis) to improve segmentation quality. One problem faced when evaluating filtering algorithms is that real image data in general are not equipped with the `ground truth' for the microstructure characteristics. For this study, we construct synthetic images for which the ground-truth values are known. On the synthetic images, we compare the pore tortuosity and Minkowski functionals (volume and surface area) computed with our PerSplat filter and other methods such as total variation (TV) and non-local means (NL-means). Moreover, on a real 3D image, we visually compare the segmentation results provided by our filter against TV and NL-means. The experimental results indicate that PerSplat provides a significant improvement in segmentation quality.