title: The spherical deformation model.
abstract: Miller et al. (1994) describe a model for representing spatial objects with no obvious landmarks. Each object is represented by a global translation and a normal deformation of a sphere. The normal deformation is defined via the orthonormal spherical-harmonic basis. In this paper we analyse the spherical deformation model in detail and describe how it may be used to summarize the shape of star-shaped three-dimensional objects with few parameters. It is of interest to make statistical inference about the three-dimensional shape parameters from continuous observations of the surface and from a single central section of the object. We use maximum-likelihood-based inference for this purpose and demonstrate the suggested methods on real data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. asho@imf.au.dk
authors.forename: Asger
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hobolth
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000166:cytology; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008954:Models, Biological; D009474:Neurons / Q000166:cytology