A statistical shape model of the skull developed from a South African population.

This paper discusses the development of a statistical shape model (SSM) of the skull from a South African population. A total of 16 skulls is used together with a reference from the Basel Face Model. A free-form deformation model is built using the reference model and the squared exponential kernel. The freeform model is used to establish dense correspondence across the skull sample and the in-correspondence skulls are then used to build an SSM. The validity of the SSM is assessed using leave-one-out cross-validation with its generality ranging between 1.47 mm and 1.84 mm and, the specificity ranging between 1.74 mm and 2.11 mm.