Global spectral graph wavelet signature for surface analysis of carpal bones

Quantitative shape comparison is a fundamental problem in computer vision, geometry processing and medical imaging. In this paper, we present a spectral graph wavelet approach for shape analysis of carpal bones of the human wrist. We employ spectral graph wavelets to represent the cortical surface of a carpal bone via the spectral geometric analysis of the Laplace-Beltrami operator in the discrete domain. We propose global spectral graph wavelet (GSGW) descriptor that is isometric invariant, efficient to compute, and combines the advantages of both low-pass and band-pass filters. We perform experiments on shapes of the carpal bones of ten women and ten men from a publicly-available database of wrist bones. Using one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and permutation testing, we show through extensive experiments that the proposed GSGW framework gives a much better performance compared to the global point signature embedding approach for comparing shapes of the carpal bones across populations.