Dolores Messer: Museums worldwide are digitizing their collections. This enables documentation for future generations, sharing of cultural and natural heritage among researchers all over the world, and making discoveries that are otherwise not possible.
As a part of the digitalization process, the Natural History Museum at Copenhagen is interested in obtaining
accurate 3D scans of a large collection of bone specimens, primarily skulls.
This project deals with shape analysis applied to evolutionary biology in collaboration with the Center for GeoGenetics
at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. We plan to scan two collections - horse teeth, and polar bear skulls
- which will serve as case studies for this project.
The overall goal is to design a pipeline where archaeological bone specimens are automatically registered as 3D
point clouds, and robust automatic shape analysis is performed. While working on the case studies, new methods for
advanced morphometric and evolutionary shape modeling based on accurate scans of a large number of specimens
will be developed. These methods will be based on millions of scan points acquired automatically, instead of 30-50
manually placed landmarks. In order to achieve a level of automation needed for fully exploiting the possibilities of
digitizing the bone collections, we need to address a number of shape modeling challenges, such as e.g. the problem of
missing data that arises due to the fragmentary nature of archaeological specimens. Investigations of how to automate
the registration process, and how to formulate and use a shape model will be core topics of the project. We aim at
developing general methods, which can be applied across the different collections and capturing modalities.
In collaboration with both CTEG Berkeley and GeoGenetics Copenhagen, we will combine the obtained evolutionary
shape model to genome sequences, casting light to correlation between shape features and genome expression.
The aim is to build a joint evolutionary model of morphometric and genetic traits in order to gain insights in correlation
between shape and DNA.
PhD project titel: 3D Shape Analysis for Morphometric Evolutionary Modelling- based on 3D X-ray Tomography and Optical Scanning
Effective start/end date 01/06/2016 → 10/05/2020
Supervisor: Anders B. Dahl & Vedrana A. Dahl, Section for Visual Computing