Statistical Shape Analysis, 2nd Edition

Preface

Since the publication of the first edition of this book (Dryden and Mardia 1998) there have been numerous exciting novel developments in the field of statistical shape analysis. Although a book length treatment of the new developments is certainly merited, much of the work that we discussed in the first edition still forms the foundations of new methodology. The shear volume of applications of the methodology has multiplied significantly, and we are frequently amazed by the breadth of applications of the field.

The first edition of the book primarily discussed the topic of landmark shape analysis, which is still the core material of the field. We have updated the material, with a new focus on illustrating the methodology with examples based on the shapes package (Dryden 2015) in R (R Development Core Team 2015). This new focus on R applications and an extension of the material has resulted in the new title ‘Statistical Shape Analysis, with Applications in R’ for this second edition. There is more emphasis on the joint analysis of size and shape (form) in this edition, treatment of unlabelled size-and-shape and shape analysis, more three-dimensional applications and more discussion of general Riemannian manifolds, providing more context in our discussion of geometry of size and shape spaces. All chapters contain a good deal of new material and we have rearranged some of the ordering of topics for a more coherent treatment. Chapters 6, 13, 14, 16 and 18 are almost entirely ...