GAMEs: growing and adaptive meshes for fully automatic shape modeling and analysis.

This paper presents a new framework for shape modeling and analysis, rooted in the pattern recognition theory and based on artificial neural networks. Growing and adaptive meshes (GAMEs) are introduced: GAMEs combine the self-organizing networks which grow when require (SONGWR) algorithm and the Kohonen's self-organizing maps (SOMs) in order to build a mesh representation of a given shape and adapt it to instances of similar shapes. The modeling of a surface is seen as an unsupervised clustering problem, and tackled by using SONGWR (topology-learning phase). The point correspondence between point distribution models is granted by adapting the original model to other instances: the adaptation is seen as a classification task and performed accordingly to SOMs (topology-preserving phase). We thoroughly evaluated our method on challenging synthetic datasets, with different levels of noise and shape variations. Finally, we describe its application to the analysis of a challenging medical dataset. Our method proved to be reproducible, robust to noise, and capable of capturing real variations within and between groups of shapes.