Generating a morphable model of ears

This paper describes the generation of a morphable model for external ear shapes. The aim for the morphable model is to characterize an ear shape using only a few parameters in order to assist the study of morphoacoustics. The model is derived from a statistical analysis of a population of 58 ears from the SYMARE database. It is based upon the framework of large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) and the vector space that is constructed over the space of initial momentums describing the diffeomorphic transformations. To develop a morphable model using the LDDMM framework, the initial momentums are analyzed using a kernel based principal component analysis. In this paper, we examine the ability of our morphable model to construct test ear shapes not included in the principal component analysis.