Mean surface and volume particle tensors under L-restricted isotropy and associated ellipsoids

Abstract The convex-geometric Minkowski tensors contain information about shape and orientation of the underlying convex body. They therefore yield valuable summary statistics for stationary marked point processes with marks in the family of convex bodies, or, slightly more specialised, for stationary particle processes. We show here that if the distribution of the typical particle is invariant under rotations about a fixed k-plane, then the average volume tensors of the typical particle can be derived from k + 1-dimensional sections. This finding extends the well-known three-dimensional special case to higher dimensions. A corresponding result for the surface tensors is also proven. In the last part of the paper we show how Minkowski tensors can be used to define three ellipsoidal set-valued summary statistics, discuss their estimation and illustrate their construction and use in a simulation example. Two of these, the so-called Miles ellipsoid and the inertia ellipsoid, are based on mean volume tensors of ranks up to 2. The third, based on the mean surface tensor of rank 2, will be called the Blaschke ellipsoid and is only defined when the typical particle has a rotationally symmetric distribution about an axis, as we then can use uniqueness and reconstruction results for centred ellipsoids of revolution from their rank-2 surface tensor. The latter are also established here.