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Point-, line- or boundary-sampled intercepts may be measured inside a particle as a measure of particle size. Each intercept is primarily characterized by three geometric properties: length, location and orientation. Circle and sphere models are used in the present study to analyze these properties. The probability distribution function, probability density function, expectation and coefficient of variation for each of the properties were presented based on geometric probability and mathematical statistics. Such presentation would be helpful for potential users of stereology to better understand the concept of intercepts and implement stereological intercept measurement for estimation of particle sizes in practice.

This paper addresses the issue of obtaining the optimal rotation to match two functions on the sphere by minimizing the squared error norm and the Kullback–Leibler information criteria. In addition, the accuracy in terms of the band-limited approximations in both cases are also discussed. Algorithms for fast and accurate rotational matching play a significant role in many fields ranging from computational biology to spacecraft attitude estimation. In electron microscopy, peaks in the so-called "rotation function" determine correlations in orientation between density maps of macromolecular structures when the correspondence between the coordinates of the structures is not known. In X-ray crystallography, the rotational matching of Patterson functions in Fourier space is an important step in the determination of protein structures. In spacecraft attitude estimation, a star tracker compares observed patterns of stars with rotated versions of a template that is stored in its memory. Many algorithms for computing and sampling the rotation function have been proposed over the years. These methods usually expand the rotation function in a bandlimited Fourier series on the rotation group. In some contexts the highest peak of this function is interpreted as the optimal rotation of one structure into the other, and in other contexts multiple peaks describe symmetries in the functions being compared. Prior works on rotational matching seek to maximize the correlation between two functions on the sphere. We also consider the use of the Kullback–Leibler information criteria. A gradient descent algorithm is proposed for obtaining the optimal rotation, and a measure is defined to compare the convergence of this procedure applied to the maximal correlation and Kullback–Leibler information criteria.