The talk describes new distances between pairs of two-dimensional surfaces (embedded in three-dimensional space) that use both local structures and global information in the surfaces. These are motivated by the need of biological morphologists to compare different phenotypical structures, and to study relationships of living or extinct animals with their surroundings and each other. This is typically done from carefully defined anatomical correspondence points (landmarks) on bones, for example.
Unlike other algorithms presented for morphological correspondences, this approach does not require any preliminary marking of special features or landmarks by the user. It also differs from other seminal work in computational geometry in that the algorithms are polynomial in nature and thus faster, making pairwise comparisons feasible for significantly larger numbers of digitized surfaces. The approach is illustrated using three datasets representing teeth and different bones of primates and humans, which leads to highly accurate results.
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