Summary: This paper extends parts of the results from [P. W. Michor and D. Mumford, Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. 23, No. 1, 74–113 (2007; Zbl 1116.58007)] for plane curves to the case of hypersurfaces in \(\mathbb R^n\).
Let \(M\) be a compact connected oriented \(n-1\) dimensional manifold without boundary like the sphere or the torus. Then shape space is either the manifold of submanifolds of \(\mathbb R^n\) of type \(M\) or the orbifold of immersions from \(M\) to \(\mathbb R^n\) modulo the group of diffeomorphisms of \(M\). We investigate almost local Riemannian metrics on shape space. These are induced by metrics of the following form on the space of immersions: \(G_f(h,k) = \int_{M} \Phi(\mathrm{Vol}(f),\mathrm{Tr}(L))\bar{g}(h, k) \mathrm{vol}(f^*\bar{g})\), where \(\bar{g}\) is the Euclidean metric on \(\mathbb R^n\), \(f^*\bar{g}\) is the induced metric on \(M\), \(h,k\in C^\infty(M,\mathbb R^n)\) are tangent vectors at f to the space of embeddings or immersions, where \(\Phi:\mathbb R^2\to \mathbb R_{>0}\) is a suitable smooth function, \(\mathrm{Vol}(f) = \int_M \mathrm {vol}(f^*\bar{g})\) is the total hypersurface volume of \(f(M)\), and the trace \(Tr(L)\) of the Weingarten mapping is the mean curvature. For these metrics we compute the geodesic equations both on the space of immersions and on shape space, the conserved momenta arising from the obvious symmetries, and the sectional curvature. For special choices of \(\Phi\) we give complete formulas for the sectional curvature. Numerical experiments illustrate the behavior of these metrics.