  We present 2 statistical models of the skull and mandible built upon an
elastic registration method of 3D meshes. The aim of this work is to relate
degrees of freedom of skull anatomy, as static relations are of main interest
for anthropology and legal medicine. Statistical models can effectively provide
reconstructions together with statistical precision. In our applications,
patient-specific meshes of the skull and the mandible are high-density meshes,
extracted from 3D CT scans. All our patient-specific meshes are registrated in
a subject-shared reference system using our 3D-to-3D elastic matching
algorithm. Registration is based upon the minimization of a distance between
the high density mesh and a shared low density mesh, defined on the vertexes,
in a multi resolution approach. A Principal Component analysis is performed on
the normalised registrated data to build a statistical linear model of the
skull and mandible shape variation. The accuracy of the reconstruction is under
the millimetre in the shape space (after rigid registration). Reconstruction
errors for Scan data of tests individuals are below registration noise. To take
in count the articulated aspect of the skull in our model, Kernel Principal
Component Analysis is applied, extracting a non-linear parameter associated
with mandible position, therefore building a statistical articulated 3D model
of the skull.
