Low-degree approximation of high-degree B-spline surfaces

In this paper, a method for approximate conversion of high degree Bezier and B-spline surfaces to lower degree representations is presented to facilitate the exchange of surface geometry between different geometric modeling systems. Building on previous work on curve approximation, the method uses adaptive sampling to compute approximation error and lofting of isoparametric curves to produce the approximating surface. In addition, a bound for the approximation accuracy is computed using convex hulls.