Introduction

The human body has fascinated scientists for thousands of years. Studying the shape of the human body offers opportunities to open up entirely new areas of research. The shape of the human body can be used to infer personal characteristics and features. Body type and muscle strength, for instance, can be used to distinguish gender. The presence or absence of wrinkles around the eyes and loose facial skin suggests a person's age. In addition, the size and shape of a person's face, belly, thighs, and arms can determine a body habitus: slim, healthy, or overweight. The length of individual limbs such as legs and their postural sway when a person walks suggests an underlying misalignment of the bone structure. It is, in fact, possible to identify people by their physical body shape of the entire body. Unlike traditional physical measures of height, width, and length of body parts, the body shape is represented by a closed surface of the entire human body as a 2-manifold. The surface is digitally captured and described by geometric primitives such as vertices, lines, and curves. It is useful for health professionals and technical experts to retrieve personal data from a shared database whenever the need arises. Using a large number of body shape measurements, valuable personal characteristics can be statistically analyzed. If there is a strong correlation between body shape and medical disease, for instance, we can avoid invasive diagnostic procedures such as medical imaging methods that utilize electromagnetic radiation.