Improving the reliability of shape comparison by perturbation

Shape comparison is a key scenario in morphometric study, where registration is often involved and found to be unreliable: different registrations can lead to different shape differences. This paper proposes a generic scheme applicable to most registration methods, to reduce this unreliability. It perturbs the registration processes by feeding them with resampled shape groups, and then aggregates the results to yield the final result. This scheme can be simplified for pair-wise registration methods to reduce the computation. Experiments are conducted on both synthetic and biomedical shapes using different registration methods, which demonstrate its effectiveness.