Quantitiative Shape Description
Project Description
What is shape? You know what a shape is, I know what a shape is, but try telling a computer what a shape is! Computers are notoriously bad at finding shapes in digital images, but this is a very important application of mathematics. Automated face recognition and fingerprint identification are two applications of this type of mathematics, but biologists who study morphology are also interested in this. In this project, a student will investigate a way of describing two dimensional shapes that was invented by two biologists and apply that understanding to describing shapes in images obtained by research biologists who are working in Kirksville. The mathematical descriptions will allow us to compare similar shapes and come up with quantitiative meausres of their differences. We will take care that our approach to shape description is objective and repeatable by others, an important property if our approach is to be valued by scientists.
One behavior we see in the ridge, valley, and connector curves.
A two dimensional slice of an MRI of a person's head can be viewed as the graph of a real-valued function of two variables.
Background Needed
A student should have had at least Calculus I and an introductory statistics course. Familiarity with computers is also essential, but who doesn't know how to work with a computer these days? No experience programming is necessary, but a student must have a willingness to learn some programming skills over the summer.