Surface Comparison With Mass Transportation

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Yaron Lipman, Princeton University
Fine Hall 314

A method for transportation of metric between simply-connected surfaces with boundary is presented. The method is based on classical uniformization and optimal mass transportation. One application of the method is a novel definition of distance function between simply-connected surfaces with boundaries. The new distance forms a tractable/constructive alternative to the theoretically sound but hard to compute Gromov-Hausdorff distance. We will also show how this distance can be used to find automatic correspondences between some "real-life" surfaces.