Analysis of Rotational Deformations from Directional Data

This paper discusses a novel framework to analyze rotational deformations of real 3D objects. The rotational deformations such as twisting or bending have been observed as the major variation in some medical applications, where the features of the deformed 3D objects are directional data. We propose modeling and estimation of the global deformations in terms of generalized rotations of directions. The proposed method can be cast as a generalized small circle fitting on the unit sphere. We also discuss the estimation of descriptors for more complex deformations composed of two simple deformations. The proposed method can be used for a number of different 3D object models. Two analyses of 3D object data are presented in detail: one using skeletal representations in medical image analysis as well as one from biomechanical gait analysis of the knee joint. Supplementary Materials are available online.