In this paper we explore the use of shapes of noses for
performing partial human biometrics. The basic idea is to
represent nasal surfaces using indexed collections of isocurves,
and to analyze shapes of noses by comparing their
corresponding curves. We extend past work in Riemannian
analysis of shapes of closed curves in R3 to obtain a similar
Riemannian analysis for nasal surfaces. In particular,
we obtain algorithms for computing geodesics, computing
statistical means, and stochastic clustering.We demonstrate
these ideas in two application contexts : authentication and
identification. We evaluate performances on a large database
involving 2000 scans from FRGC v2 database, and
present a hierarchical organization of nose databases to allow
for efficient searches.