Gaussian Process Landmarking for Three-Dimensional Geometric Morphometrics

07/31/2018

∙

by   Tingran Gao, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

We demonstrate applications of the Gaussian process-based landmarking algorithm proposed in [T. Gao, S.Z. Kovalsky, I. Daubechies 2018] to geometric morphometrics, a branch of evolutionary biology centered at the analysis and comparisons of anatomical shapes, and compares the automatically sampled landmarks with the "ground truth" landmarks manually placed by evolutionary anthropologists; the results suggest that Gaussian process landmarks perform equally well or better, in terms of both spatial coverage and downstream statistical analysis. We provide a detailed exposition of numerical procedures and feature filtering algorithms for computing high-quality and semantically meaningful diffeomorphisms between disk-type anatomical surfaces.