This paper describes a novel framework for computing geodesic paths in shape spaces of spherical surfaces under an elastic Riemannian metric. The novelty lies in defining this Riemannian metric directly on the quotient (shape) space, rather than inheriting it from pre-shape space, and using it to formulate a path energy that measures only the normal components of velocities along the path. In other words, this paper defines and solves for geodesics directly on the shape space and avoids complications resulting from the quotient operation. This comprehensive framework is invariant to arbitrary parameterizations of surfaces along paths, a phenomenon termed as gauge invariance. Additionally, this paper makes a link between different elastic metrics used in the computer science literature on one hand, and the mathematical literature on the other hand, and provides a geometrical interpretation of the terms involved. Examples using real and simulated 3D objects are provided to help illustrate the main ideas.

We study the pull-back of the 2-parameter family of quotient elastic metrics introduced in [13] on the space of arc-length parameterized curves. This point of view has the advantage of concentrating on the manifold of arc-length parameterized curves, which is a very natural manifold when the analysis of un-parameterized curves is concerned, pushing aside the tricky quotient procedure detailed in [12] of the preshape space of parameterized curves by the reparameterization (semi-)group. In order to study the problem of finding geodesics between two given arc-length parameterized curves under these quotient elastic metrics, we give a precise computation of the gradient of the energy functional in the smooth case as well as a discretization of it, and implement a path-straightening method. This allows us to have a better understanding of how the landscape of the energy functional varies with respect to the parameters.

In the finite-dimensional setting, every Hermitian-symmetric space of compact type is a coadjoint orbit of a finite-dimensional Lie group. It is natural to ask whether every infinite-dimensional Hermitian-symmetric space of compact type, which is a particular example of an Hilbert manifold, is transitively acted upon by a Hilbert Lie group of isometries. In this paper we give the classification of infinite-dimensional irreducible Hermitian-symmetric affine coadjoint orbits of connected simple L*-groups of compact type using the notion of simple roots of non-compact type. The key step is, given an infinite-dimensional symmetric pair (, ), where is a simple L*-algebra of compact type and a subalgebra of , to construct an increasing sequence of finite-dimensional subalgebras _n of together with an increasing sequence of finite-dimensional subalgebras _n of such that , , and such that the pairs (_n, _n) are symmetric. Comparing with the classification of Hermitian-symmetric spaces given by W. Kaup, it follows that any Hermitian-symmetric space of compact or non-compact type is an affine-coadjoint orbit of an Hilbert Lie group.