Geodesic Curves for Analysis of Continuous Implicit Shapes

A method is proposed for performing shape analysis of m-surfaces, e.g., planar curves and surfaces, with a geometric interpretation. The analysis uses an implicit surface representation and connects the popular level set approach with shape analysis. The representation is continuous and completely landmark-free. Shapes are represented as points on an infinite-dimensional manifold and the distance between two surfaces is given by the length of a path on this manifold. The analysis is valid in any dimension and examples of applications such as interpolation and clustering are given