Dr. Gérard Subsol, Projet EPIDAURE, INRIA Sophia Antipolis - France
1. Automatic extraction of sets of crest lines in the 3D CT-Scan images of the skull of a prehistoric man (Broken-Hill, 400,000 years old) and of the skull of a contemporary man.
2. Automatic registration of the two sets of lines.
3. Based on the point to point correspondences found in previous step, computation of a 3D spline transformation that superimposes the two skull surfaces.
4. Interpolation of the transformation at different time points to create intermediary transformations.
5. Application of these transformations to the 3D surface reconstruction of the contemporary skull to create an animation.
Visualisation of the "evolution" of the skull shape between a contemporary and a prehistoric man (animated GIF).
The movements of some features as the forehead are characteristic of the evolution of the skull shape.
These results will be extended by a quantitative analysis of the morphometrical changes of the skull within a collaboration, within a collaboration with the Laboratory of Anthropology, University of Marseille and the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (Bertrand Mafart, Henry de Lumley).