Statistical Shape Analysis for Image Understanding and Object Recognition

In order to analyze the effects of noise on certain recognition and reconstruction algorithms, including the sensitivity of the so-called object/image equations and object/image metrics, one needs to study probability and statistics on shape spaces. Work along these lines was pioneered by Kendall and has been the subject of many papers over the last twenty years. In this paper we extend some of those results to affine shape spaces and then use them to relate distributions on object shapes to corresponding distributions on image shapes.