Optimization and Systems Theory Seminar
Friday, January 30 2009, 11.00, Room 3721, Lindstedtsvägen 25


Angelo Cenedese
E-mail: angelo.cenedese@unipd.it

Shape analysis and deformation control

The study of the shape of deformable objects is a challenging task both in understanding and in controlling the deformation. The reasons of this hardship range from the difficulty of finding a proper definition of "shape" that accords with the intuition, to that of providing a compact model of an intrinsic infinite-dimensionality object that is representative of its continuous deformation. Nonetheless, this study finds a motivation in various industrial applications and research fields: interestingly, the perception of shapes and motion is a canonical problem  in the active vision field and many approaches to shape description and analysis rely on and are derived from related research in this specific area.


In particular, modeling the shape can be obtained through procrustean techniques, based on the choice of spatially discrete landmarks or features of interest on the object surface, or conversely through integral approaches, resorting to the use of continuous functions such as, for example, 2D silhouette curves for planar objects, or detectable patterns on the object surface. The choice of the model on the one side suggests suitable metrics to understand the difference in shape for classification and to allow the description of shape among several objects, on the other yields different methods to follow the shape evolution in time and discern the application of motion transformation from that of proper deformation, as actually grasped by human intuition.


Calendar of seminars Last update: January 8, 2009 by Marie Lundin.