Intrinsic shape

Abstract

Everybody has a common sense notion of the shape of an object. This notion is invariant to rigid motions of the object, such as translations, rotations, and reflections. In many applications, however, the object is viewed through a deforming transformation so that the object appears to have a different shape. The concept of intrinsic shape of an object as an invariant to a more general class of deforming transformations and then recovering this invariant from the actual data available is described briefly.