We use mass-transportation as a tool to compare surfaces (2-manifolds). In particular, we determine the similarity of two given surfaces by solving a mass-transportation problem between their conformal densities. This mass transportation problem differs from the standard case in that we require the solution to be invariant under global Mobius transformations. Our approach provides a constructive way of defining a metric in the abstract space of simply-connected smooth surfaces with boundary (i.e. surfaces of disk-type); this metric can also be used to define meaningful intrinsic distances between pairs of patches in the two surfaces, which allows automatic alignment of the surfaces. We provide numerical experiments on real-life surfaces to demonstrate possible applications in natural sciences.
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