Statistical Shape Models (SSM) have wide applications in image segmentation, surface
registration and morphometry. This thesis deals with an important issue in SSM, which
is establishing correspondence between a set of shape surfaces on either 2D or 3D.
Current methods involve either manual annotation of the data (current ‘gold standard’);
or establishing correspondences by using segmentation or registration algorithms; or
using an information technique, Minimum Description Length (MDL), as an objective
function that measures the utility of a model (the state-of-the-art). This thesis presents in
principle another framework for establishing correspondences completely automatically
by treating it as a learning process. Shannon theory is used extensively to develop an
objective function, which measures the performance of a model along each eigenvector
direction, and a proper weighting is automatically calculated for each energy component.
Correspondence finding can then be treated as optimizing the objective function. An
efficient optimization method is also incorporated by deriving the gradient of the cost
function. Experimental results on various data are presented on both 2D and 3D. In the
end, a quantitative evaluation between the proposed algorithm and MDL shows that the
proposed model has better Generalization Ability, Specificity and similar Compactness.
It also shows a good potential ability to solve the so-called “Pile Up” problem that
exists in MDL. In terms of application, I used the proposed algorithm to help build a
facial contour classifier. First, correspondence points across facial contours are found
automatically and classifiers are trained by using the correspondence points found by
the MDL, proposed method and direct human observer. These classification schemes are then used to perform gender prediction on facial contours. The final conclusion for
the experiments is that MEM found correspondence points built classification scheme
conveys a relatively more accurate gender prediction result.
Although, we have explored the potential of our proposed method to some extent, this is
not the end of the research for this topic. The future work is also clearly stated which
includes more validations on various 3D datasets; discrimination analysis between
normal and abnormal subjects could be the direct application for the proposed algorithm,
extension to model-building using appearance information, etc