A longitudinal model for shapes through triangulation

It is known that the shapes of planar triangles can be represented by a set of points on the surface of the unit sphere. On the other hand, most of the objects can easily be triangulated and so each triangle can accordingly be treated in the context of shape analysis. There is a growing interest to fit a smooth path going through the cloud of shape data available in some time instances. To tackle this problem, we propose a longitudinal model through a triangulation procedure for the shape data. In fact, our strategy initially relies on a spherical regression model for triangles, but is extended to shape data via triangulation. Regarding modeling of directional data, we use the bivariate von Mises–Fisher distribution for density of the errors. Various forms of the composite likelihood functions, constructed by altering the assumptions considered for the angles defined for each triangle, are invoked. The proposed regression model is applied to rat skull data. Also, some simulations results are presented along with the real data results.