When people say they have published a landmark paper they usually mean that this is something which will be viewed as changing the scientific landscape. Prof Adrian Bowman and Dr Liberty Vittert are authors on a landmark paper which is actually about landmarks!  (Hopefully it will be seen as a landmark paper in the other sense too!).  In anatomy, the traditional way of approaching the measurement of shape is through the identification of points which have anatomical meaning and can be located with a good degree of reliability.  The tip of the nose, the corners of the mouth, the outer corners of the eyes are all examples.  With the high resolution data available from modern imaging methods, simple landmarks are a rather simple representation of shape but they remain widely used. 

The traditional definitions of landmarks for human faces have been reviewed as part of the research agenda of an interdisciplinary consortium - the Face3D project, funded by the Wellcome Trust.  The current standard approach requires careful orientation of the head to identify `most prominent' points and so on.  The new approach proposed by the paper is based on elementary differential geometry, using points of maximum curvature whose locations are not defined in terms of carefully oriented reference axes.  Ridge and valley curves also feature prominently in the paper as they are of anatomical interest in their own right but also a route to definitions of landmarks as positions where curves cross or where geodesic curvature is maximised.  The paper includes an experimental reliability study and a statistical analysis which allows the different sources of variation in landmark identification to be identified and quantified.

‌The image shows a human face (actually one of our previous MSc students) coloured by "shape index" to characterise local surface type and with landmarks and curves superimposed.

Reference: The definitions of three-dimensional landmarks on the human face: an interdisciplinary view.

S. Katina, K. McNeil, A. Ayoub, B. Guilfoyle, B. Khambay, P. Siebert, F. Sukno, M. Rojas, L. Vittert, J. Waddington, P. F. Whelan and A. W. Bowman.

Journal of Anatomy 2015.

First published: 30 March 2016

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