kimmel's contributions include the development of fast marching methods for triangulated manifolds (together with james sethian), the geodesic active contours algorithm for image segmentation, a geometric framework for image filtering (named "beltrami flow" after the italian mathematician eugenio beltrami), and the generalized multidimensional scaling (together with his students the bronstein brothers) with which he was able to compute the gromov-hausdorff distance between surfaces.