Shape Curve Analysis Using Curvature

Statistical shape analysis is a field for which there is growing demand. One of the major drivers for this growth is the number of practical applications which can use statistical shape analysis to provide useful insight. An example of one of these practical applications is investigating and comparing facial shapes. An ever improving suite of digital imaging technology can capture data on the threedimensional shape of facial features from standard images. A field for which this offers a large amount of potential analytical benefit is the reconstruction of the facial surface of children born with a cleft lip or a cleft lip and palate. This thesis will present two potential methods for analysing data on the facial shape of children who were born with a cleft lip and/or palate using data from two separate studies. One form of analysis will compare the facial shape of one year old children born with a cleft lip and/or palate with the facial shape of control children. The second form of analysis will look for relationships between facial shape and psychological score for ten year old children born with a cleft lip and/or palate. While many of the techniques in this thesis could be extended to different applications much of the work is carried out with the express intention of producing meaningful analysis of the cleft children studies. Shape data can be defined as the information remaining to describe the shape of an object after removing the effects of location, rotation and scale. There are numerous techniques in the literature to remove the effects of location, rotation and scale and thereby define and compare the shapes of objects. A method which does not require the removal of the effects of location and rotation is to define the shape according to the bending of important shape curves. This method can naturally provide a technique for investigating facial shape. When considering a child’s face there are a number of curves which outline the important features of the face. Describing these feature curves gives a large amount of information on the shape of the face. This thesis looks to define the shape of children’s faces using functions of