Comparing shapes of high genus surfaces (Q2143456)

In this paper, the author defines a new metric structure on the shape space of a high genus surface. More precisely, the shape space is defined as the space of equivalence classes of Riemannian metrics on a fixed smooth surface, up to isometries isotopic to the identity on the surface. Then the author constructs a metric \(d\) on the shape space by introducing an energy for quasiconformal homeomorphisms of the surface, which measures the similarity of two shapes. He shows that the infimum of this energy in a fixed homotopy class is achieved by a quasiconformal homeomorphism, which produces the ``optimal'' correspondence between two shapes and realizes the distance between two shapes. Let us remark that comparing shapes of high genus surfaces is much more challenging than the case of the 2-sphere. Indeed, any two metrics on the 2-sphere are conformal to each other, but for high-genus surfaces, conformal maps are insufficient to measure the difference between two shapes. From an algorithmic point of view, the main difficulty is how to deal with the topology of the surfaces.