AN EXAMPLE OF AUTOMATED SHAPE ANALYSIS TO SOLVE HUMAN PERCEPTION PROBLEMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

An application of shape recognition in Anthropology is described. It represents a new opportunity to employ a relatively sophisticated and accurate model to represent and characterise bone surface in digital form.

The paper moves from a "subjectivity" derived by a human spatial process and reasoning to the "objectivity" derived by an automated methodology: it is asked whether computer technologies give the opportunity to overcome traditional measurement methods used in Anthropology and also to investigate biomechanical and morphofunctional aspects. The aim is that these new perspectives of research contribute to solve some problems in shape analysis.

In particular a technique of geometric reasoning is proposed to automatically recognise and extract morphological characteristics from bone surfaces represented by contours. The technique starts from a geometric model with the aim to define a new model able to provide a higher level of information, based on the main morphological properties. The morphological characterisation is obtained through a well known technique in image analysis, namely Medial Axis Transformation: the medial axes are derived and classified into groups forming the morphological elements.