2D-Shape Analysis Using Conformal Mapping

The study of 2D shapes and their similarities is a central problem in the field of vision. It arises in particular from the task of classifying and recognizing objects from their observed silhouette. Defining natural distances between 2D shapes creates a metric space of shapes, whose mathematical structure is inherently relevant to the classification task. One intriguing metric space comes from using conformal mappings of 2D shapes into each other, via the theory of Teichmüller spaces. In this space every simple closed curve in the plane (a “shape”) is represented by a ‘fingerprint’ which is a diffeomorphism of the unit circle to itself (a differentiable and invertible, periodic function). More precisely, every shape defines to a unique equivalence class of such diffeomorphisms up to right multiplication by a Möbius map. The fingerprint does not change if the shape is varied by translations and scaling and any such equivalence class comes from some shape. This coset space, equipped with the infinitesimal Weil-Petersson (WP) Riemannian norm is a metric space. In this space, the shortest path between each two shapes is unique, and is given by a geodesic connecting them. Their distance from each other is given by integrating the WP-norm along that geodesic. In this paper we concentrate on solving the “welding” problem of “sewing” together conformally the interior and exterior of the unit circle, glued on the unit circle by a given diffeomorphism, to obtain the unique 2D shape associated with this diffeomorphism. This will allow us to go back and forth between 2D shapes and their representing diffeomorphisms in this “space of shapes”. We then present an efficient method for computing the unique shortest path, the geodesic of shape morphing between each two end-point shapes. The group of diffeomorphisms of S^1 acts as a group of isometries on the space of shapes and we show how this can be used to define shape transformations, like for instance ‘adding a protruding limb’ to any shape.Mathematic

Reconstruction of algebraic-exponential data from moments

Let $G$ be a bounded open subset of Euclidean space with real algebraic boundary $\Gamma$. Under the assumption that the degree $d$ of $\Gamma$ is given, and the power moments of the Lebesgue measure on $G$ are known up to order $3d$, we describe an algorithmic procedure for obtaining a polynomial vanishing on $\Gamma$. The particular case of semi-algebraic sets defined by a single polynomial inequality raises an intriguing question related to the finite determinateness of the full moment sequence. The more general case of a measure with density equal to the exponential of a polynomial is treated in parallel. Our approach relies on Stokes theorem and simple Hankel-type matrix identities

Geodesic Warps by Conformal Mappings

In recent years there has been considerable interest in methods for diffeomorphic warping of images, with applications e.g.\ in medical imaging and evolutionary biology. The original work generally cited is that of the evolutionary biologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who demonstrated warps to deform images of one species into another. However, unlike the deformations in modern methods, which are drawn from the full set of diffeomorphism, he deliberately chose lower-dimensional sets of transformations, such as planar conformal mappings. In this paper we study warps of such conformal mappings. The approach is to equip the infinite dimensional manifold of conformal embeddings with a Riemannian metric, and then use the corresponding geodesic equation in order to obtain diffeomorphic warps. After deriving the geodesic equation, a numerical discretisation method is developed. Several examples of geodesic warps are then given. We also show that the equation admits totally geodesic solutions corresponding to scaling and translation, but not to affine transformations

Local Uniqueness of the Circular Integral Invariant

This article is concerned with the representation of curves by means of integral invariants. In contrast to the classical differential invariants they have the advantage of being less sensitive with respect to noise. The integral invariant most common in use is the circular integral invariant. A major drawback of this curve descriptor, however, is the absence of any uniqueness result for this representation. This article serves as a contribution towards closing this gap by showing that the circular integral invariant is injective in a neighbourhood of the circle. In addition, we provide a stability estimate valid on this neighbourhood. The proof is an application of Riesz-Schauder theory and the implicit function theorem in a Banach space setting

A Riemannian View on Shape Optimization

Shape optimization based on the shape calculus is numerically mostly performed by means of steepest descent methods. This paper provides a novel framework to analyze shape-Newton optimization methods by exploiting a Riemannian perspective. A Riemannian shape Hessian is defined yielding often sought properties like symmetry and quadratic convergence for Newton optimization methods.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Forschungsbericht / Universit\"at Trier, Mathematik, Informatik 2012,