Biological morphology and discrete differential geometry.
Ingrid Daubechies, Duke University

Abstract: 
 The talk describes new distances between pairs of two-dimensional surfaces (embedded in three-dimensional space) that use both local structures and global information in the surfaces. These are motivated by the need of biological morphologists to compare different phenotypical structures, to study relationships of living or extinct animals with their surroundings and each other. This is typically done from carefully defined anatomical correspondence points (landmarks) on e.g. bones. We are working on building algorithms for automatic morphological correspondence maps, without any preliminary marking of special features or landmarks by the user