A Brief Introduction to Statistical Shape Analysis

This note aims at giving a brief introduction to the field of statistical shape analysis looked at from an image analysis point of view. Basic techniques such as Procrustes analysis, tangent space projection and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are presented and subsequently demonstrated and discussed in depth through a biometric case study of hands. Prerequisites are limited to basic knowledge of linear algebra and statistics at the price of a somewhat less compact presentation. To encourage learning by exploration; images, annotations and data reports from the hand study are made available for download.