This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests. The models are simple to understand and interpret and provide a useful tool to describe the global dynamics of the landmark configurations. However, because of the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, distributions in shape spaces are not straightforward to obtain.

The book explores the use of the Gaussian distribution in the configuration space, with similarity transformations integrated out. Specifically, it works with the offset-normal shape distribution as a probability model for statistical inference on a sample of a temporal sequence of landmark configurations. This enables inference for Gaussian processes from configurations onto the shape space.

They refer to the analysis of data from the FG-NET (Face and Gesture Recognition Research Network) database with facial expressions. For these data, it may be desirable to provide a description of the dynamics of the expressions, or testing whether there is a difference between the dynamics of two facial expressions or testing which of the landmarks are more informative in explaining the pattern of an expression.