These landmark points often correspond to important identifiable features such as the corners of the eyes.
This can be a baseline methods used by Fred Bookstein for geometric morphometrics in anthropology.
He used this distribution on the sphere to investigate ley lines and whether three stones were more likely to be co-linear than might be expected.
Diffeomorphometry[10] is the focus on comparison of shapes and forms with a metric structure based on diffeomorphisms, and is central to the field of Computational anatomy.
[11] Diffeomorphic registration,[12] introduced in the 90's, is now an important player with existing codes bases organized around ANTS,[13] DARTEL,[14] DEMONS,[15] LDDMM,[16] StationaryLDDMM,[17] and FastLDDMM[18] are examples of actively used computational codes for constructing correspondences between coordinate systems based on sparse features and dense images.
Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is an important technology built on many of these principles.