This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests. The models are simple to understand and interpret and provide a useful tool to describe the global dynamics of the landmark configurations. However, because of the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, distributions in shape spaces are not straightforward to obtain. The book explores the use of the Gaussian distribution in the configuration space, with similarity transformations integrated out. Specifically, it works with the offset-normal shape distribution as a probability model for statistical inference on a sample of a temporal sequence of landmark configurations. This enables inference for Gaussian processes from configurations onto the shape space. The book is divided in two parts, with the first three chapters covering material on the offset-normal shape distribution, and the remaining chapters covering the theory of NonParametric Combination (NPC) tests. The chapters offer a collection of applications which are bound together by the theme of this book. They refer to the analysis of data from the FG-NET (Face and Gesture Recognition Research Network) database with facial expressions. For these data, it may be desirable to provide a description of the dynamics of the expressions, or testing whether there is a difference between the dynamics of two facial expressions or testing which of the landmarks are more informative in explaining the pattern of an expression.

Statistical shape analysis is a geometrical analysis from a set of shapes in which statistics are measured to describe geometrical properties from similar shapes or different groups, for instance, the difference between male and female Gorilla skull shapes, normal and pathological bone shapes, etc. Some of the important aspects of shape analysis are to obtain a measure of distance between shapes, to estimate average shapes from a (possibly random) sample and to estimate shape variability in a sample 1]. One of the main methods used is principal component analysis. Specific applications of shape analysis may be found in archaeology, architecture, biology, geography, geology, agriculture, genetics, medical imaging, security applications such as face recognition, entertainment industry (movies, games), computer-aided design and manufacturing. This is a proposal for a new Brief on statistical shape analysis and the various new parametric and non-parametric methods utilized to facilitate shape analysis.