Abstract: | The paper deals with the statistical estimation of mean triangles of landmark data. For the model introduced by Bookstein (1986) three methods of estimating the “ideal” triangle are compared: the maximum likelihood method based on the exact distribution given in Mardia and Dryden (1989a), a moment method and an iterative algorithm yielding a mean triangle in the sense of Fréchet. These methods are compared by Monte Carlo simulation applied also to models with variances greater than those required for Bookstein's normal approximation. |