Surface Comparison with Mass Transportation. (arXiv:0912.3488v1 [math.NA])

We use mass-transportation as a tool to compare surfaces (2-manifolds). In
particular, we determine the "similarity" of two given surfaces by solving a
mass-transportation problem between their conformal densities. This mass
transportation problem differs from the standard case in that we require the
solution to be invariant under global M"obius transformations. Our approach
provides a constructive way of defining a metric in the abstract space of
simply-connected smooth surfaces with boundary (i.e. surfaces of disk-type);
this metric can also be used to define meaningful intrinsic distances between
pairs of "patches" in the two surfaces, which allows automatic alignment of the
surfaces. We provide numerical experiments on "real-life" surfaces to
demonstrate possible applications in natural sciences.

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Original source : http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.3488...