Some approaches to shape analysis

Analysis of shapes is important for image analysis. The notion of shapes has been used in a variety of ways across the literature. From the definition of a shape, to the derivation of statistical procedures for shape analysis, the usage of shape is different among different papers. In this paper, we summarize common attributes of different approaches, and compare a few commonly used ones. In particular, we focus on a landmark-based shape analysis, a diffeomorphism approach to shape matching, and a geometric approach to analyzing shapes of curves.