Elastic Full Procrustes Analysis of Plane Curves via Hermitian Covariance Smoothing

Determining the mean shape of a collection of curves is not a trivial task, in particular when curves are only irregularly/sparsely sampled at discrete points. We newly propose an elastic full Procrustes mean of shapes of (oriented) plane curves, which are considered equivalence classes of parameterized curves with respect to translation, rotation, scale, and re-parameterization (warping), based on the square-root-velocity (SRV) framework. Identifying the real plane with the complex numbers, we establish a connection to covariance estimation in irregular/sparse functional data analysis. We introduce Hermitian covariance smoothing and show how to employ this extension of existing covariance estimation methods for obtaining an estimator of the (in)elastic full Procrustes mean, also in the sparse case not yet covered by existing (intrinsic) elastic shape means. For this, we provide different groundwork results which are also of independent interest: we characterize (the decomposition of) the covariance structure of rotation-invariant bivariate stochastic processes using complex representations, and we identify sampling schemes that allow for exact observation of derivatives / SRV transforms of sparsely sampled curves. We demonstrate the performance of the approach in a phonetic study on tongue shapes and in different realistic simulation settings, inter alia based on handwriting data.