Human Body Shapes Anomaly Detection and Classification Using Persistent Homology

Accurate sizing systems of a population permit the minimization of the production costs of the textile apparel industry and allow firms to satisfy their customers. Hence, information about human body shapes needs to be extracted in order to examine, compare and classify human morphologies. In this paper, we use topological data analysis to study human body shapes. Persistence theory applied to anthropometric point clouds together with clustering algorithms show that relevant information about shapes is extracted by persistent homology. In particular, the homologies of human body points have interesting interpretations in terms of human anatomy. In the first place, anomalies of scans are detected using complete-linkage hierarchical clusterings. Then, a discrimination index shows which type of clustering separates gender accurately and if it is worth restricting to body trunks or not. Finally, Ward-linkage hierarchical clusterings with Davies-Bouldin, Dunn and Silhouette indices are used to define eight male morphotypes and seven female morphotypes, which are different in terms of weight classes and ratios between bust, waist and hip circumferences. The techniques used in this work permit us to classify human bodies and detect scan anomalies directly on the full human body point clouds rather than the usual methods involving the extraction of body measurements from individuals or their scans.