Planar morphometrics using Teichmüller maps

Inspired by the question of quantifying wing shape, we propose a computational approach for analysing planar shapes. We first establish a correspondence between the boundaries of two planar shapes with boundary landmarks using geometric functional data analysis and then compute a landmark-matching curvature-guided Teichmüller mapping with uniform quasi-conformal distortion in the bulk. This allows us to analyse the pair-wise difference between the planar shapes and construct a similarity matrix on which we deploy methods from network analysis to cluster shapes. We deploy our method to study a variety of Drosophila wings across species to highlight the phenotypic variation between them, and Lepidoptera wings over time to study the developmental progression of wings. Our approach of combining complex analysis, computation and statistics to quantify, compare and classify planar shapes may be usefully deployed in other biological and physical systems.