Characterization of geodesic completeness for landmark space

Abstract

We provide a full characterization of geodesic completeness for spaces of configurations of landmarks with smooth Riemannian metrics that satisfy a rotational and translation invariance and which are induced from metrics on subgroups of the diffeomorphism group for the shape domain. These spaces are widely used for applications in shape analysis, for example, for measuring shape changes in medical imaging and morphometrics in biology. For statistics of such data to be well-defined, it is imperative to know if geodesics exist for all times. We extend previously known sufficient conditions for geodesic completeness based on the regularity of the metric to give a full characterization for smooth Riemannian metrics with a rotational and translation invariance by means of an integrability criterion that involves only the behavior of the cometric kernel as landmarks approach collision. We further use the integrability criterion for geodesic completeness and previous work on stochastic completeness to construct a family of Riemannian landmark manifolds that are geodesically complete but stochastically incomplete.