Abstract: | This paper, dedicated to the 80th birthday of Professor C. R. Rao, deals with asymptotic distributions of Fréchet sample means and Fréchet total sample variance that are used in particular for data on projective shape spaces or on 3D shape spaces. One considers the intrinsic means associated with Riemannian metrics that are locally flat in a geodesically convex neighborhood around the support of a probability measure on a shape space or on a projective shape space. Such methods are needed to derive tests concerning variability of planar projective shapes in natural images or large sample and bootstrap confidence intervals for 3D mean shape coordinates of an ordered set of landmarks from laser images. |