Distribution and sampling of warp maps for curve alignment

Speaker: Karthik Bharath (Nottingham)

Abstract

Alignment of functional or curve data in the presence of important landmark information is integral to analysis of biomedical data. I will discuss a sampling scheme for warp maps used in alignment of open and closed curves, possibly with landmark constraints. The scheme provides a point process-based constructive definition of a probability measure on the set of warp maps of [0, 1] and the unit circle. The measure is used (i) as a proposal distribution in a stochastic algorithm to solve a variational formulation of curve alignment, and (ii) as a prior on warp maps in a Bayesian model for alignment.