The spherical deformation model.

Miller et al. (1994) describe a model for representing spatial objects with no obvious landmarks. Each object is represented by a global translation and a normal deformation of a sphere. The normal deformation is defined via the orthonormal spherical-harmonic basis. In this paper we analyse the spherical deformation model in detail and describe how it may be used to summarize the shape of star-shaped three-dimensional objects with few parameters. It is of interest to make statistical inference about the three-dimensional shape parameters from continuous observations of the surface and from a single central section of the object. We use maximum-likelihood-based inference for this purpose and demonstrate the suggested methods on real data.