Matrix Cubic Splines for Progressive 3D Imaging

Mathematical theory of matrix cubic splines is introduced, then adapted for progressive rendering of images. 2D subsets of a 3D digital object are transmitted progressively under some ordering scheme, and subsequent reconstructions using the matrix cubic spline algorithm provide an evolving 3D rendering. The process can be an effective tool for browsing three dimensional objects, and effectiveness is illustrated with a test data set consisting of 93 CT slices of a human head. The procedure has been implemented on a single processor PC system, to provide a platform for full 3D experimentation; performance is discussed. A web address for the complete, documented Mathematica code is given.     

代数三角混合的样条曲线

B样条曲线能对多项式参数曲线提供有效的控制,但是它不能表示一些超越曲线,因此,很多文献提供了新的模型来构造曲线,但是这些模型要么只能表示低阶曲线,要么不能表示圆的渐开线和圆锥螺线．对此,在空间Ωk=span{cost,sint,tcost,tsint,1,t,t^2,…,t^（k-1）}（k≥5）中构造一类曲线,称为节点序列丁上的代数三角撬合的k阶样条曲线（代数三角样条曲线）,该类曲线具有很多与B样条曲线类似的性质,利用这些性质可以通过嵌入新节点对曲线进行逼近,并且可以精确表示圆锥螺线、圆的渐开线等超越曲线.     

Parameterdarstellung kubischer und bikubischer Splines

The known representation of curves and surfaces by P. Bezier is applied to cubic and bicubic splines. In this form spline-conditions are particularly vivid and along easily manageable. A parametric representation naturally connected with spline-conditions allows moreover a most simple and clear correction of splines and bisplines.     

Subdivision Schemes for Thin Plate Splines

Thin plate splines are a well known entity of geometric design. They are defined as the minimizer of a variational problem whose differential operators approximate a simple notion of bending energy. Therefore, thin plate splines approximate surfaces with minimal bending energy and they are widely considered as the standard "fair" surface model. Such surfaces are desired for many modeling and design applications.
Traditionally, the way to construct such surfaces is to solve the associated variational problem using finite elements or by using analytic solutions based on radial basis functions. This paper presents a novel approach for defining and computing thin plate splines using subdivision methods. We present two methods for the construction of thin plate splines based on subdivision: A globally supported subdivision scheme which exactly minimizes the energy functional as well as a family of strictly local subdivision schemes which only utilize a small, finite number of distinct subdivision rules and approximately solve the variational problem. A tradeoff between the accuracy of the approximation and the locality of the subdivision scheme is used to pick a particular member of this family of subdivision schemes.
Later, we show applications of these approximating subdivision schemes to scattered data interpolation and the design of fair surfaces. In particular we suggest an efficient methodology for finding control points for the local subdivision scheme that will lead to an interpolating limit surface and demonstrate how the schemes can be used for the effective and efficient design of fair surfaces.     

Trivariate Biharmonic B‐Splines

In this paper, we formulate a novel trivariate biharmonic B‐spline defined over bounded volumetric domain. The properties of bi‐Laplacian have been well investigated, but the straightforward generalization from bivariate case to trivariate one gives rise to unsatisfactory discretization, due to the dramatically uneven distribution of neighbouring knots in 3D. To ameliorate, our original idea is to extend the bivariate biharmonic B‐spline to the trivariate one with novel formulations based on quadratic programming, approximating the properties of localization and partition of unity. And we design a novel discrete biharmonic operator which is optimized more robustly for a specific set of functions for unevenly sampled knots compared with previous methods. Our experiments demonstrate that our 3D discrete biharmonic operators are robust for unevenly distributed knots and illustrate that our algorithm is superior to previous algorithms.     

Least Committed Splines in 3D Modelling of Free Form Objects from Intensity Images

Generating 3D models of objects from video sequences is an important problem in many multimedia applications ranging from teleconferencing to virtual reality. In this paper, we present a method of estimating the 3D face model from a monocular image sequence, using a few standard results from the affine camera geometry literature in computer vision, and spline fitting techniques using a modified non parametric regression technique. We use the bicubic spline functions to model the depth map, given a set of observation depth maps computed from frame pairs in a video sequence. The minimal number of splines are chosen on the basis of the Schwartz's Criterion. We extend the spline fitting algorithm to hierarchical splines. Note that the camera calibration parameters and the prior knowledge of the object shape is not required by the algorithm. The system has been successfully demonstrated to extract 3D face structure of humans as well as other objects, starting from their image sequences.     

图像插值的多结点样条技术

为了获得质量更好的插值图像,提出了用具有紧支集的多结点样条基函数来进行图像插值的新技术,并首先将1维的多结点样条插值算法推广到2维,建立了用于图像数据的插值公式;然后分析了多结点样条插值方法的逼近精度、正则性、插值核函数的频域特性.对逼近精度、正则性、插值核函数频域特性的比较表明,该插值方法优于传统的三次卷积插值方法,实验结果也证实了用多结点样条插值算法重建的图像具有更高的质量.     

Sketching Clothoid Splines Using Shortest Paths

Clothoid splines are gaining popularity as a curve representation due to their intrinsically pleasing curvature, which varies piecewise linearly over arc length. However, constructing them from hand‐drawn strokes remains difficult. Building on recent results, we describe a novel algorithm for approximating a sketched stroke with a fair (i.e., visually pleasing) clothoid spline. Fairness depends on proper segmentation of the stroke into curve primitives — lines, arcs, and clothoids. Our main idea is to cast the segmentation as a shortest path problem on a carefully constructed weighted graph. The nodes in our graph correspond to a vastly overcomplete set of curve primitives that are fit to every subsegment of the sketch, and edges correspond to transitions of a specified degree of continuity between curve primitives. The shortest path in the graph corresponds to a desirable segmentation of the input curve. Once the segmentation is found, the primitives are fit to the curve using non‐linear constrained optimization. We demonstrate that the curves produced by our method have good curvature profiles, while staying close to the user sketch.     

Splines in Higher Order TV Regularization

Splines play an important role as solutions of various interpolation and approximation problems that minimize special functionals in some smoothness spaces. In this paper, we show in a strictly discrete setting that splines of degree m−1 solve also a minimization problem with quadratic data term and m-th order total variation (TV) regularization term. In contrast to problems with quadratic regularization terms involving m-th order derivatives, the spline knots are not known in advance but depend on the input data and the regularization parameter λ. More precisely, the spline knots are determined by the contact points of the m–th discrete antiderivative of the solution with the tube of width 2λ around the m-th discrete antiderivative of the input data. We point out that the dual formulation of our minimization problem can be considered as support vector regression problem in the discrete counterpart of the Sobolev space W _2,0 ^m . From this point of view, the solution of our minimization problem has a sparse representation in terms of discrete fundamental splines.     

Quasi-circular Splines: A Shape-Preserving Approximation

The "quasi-circular spline" is introduced as a new method for approximating closed, smooth planar shapes from curvature information. A current application is the measurement of shapes of solid rocket booster cross-sections. Because of the efficiency of the algorithm and its desirable geometric properties, it is also particularly appropriate for computer graphics. The simplicity and efficiency of the quasi-circular spline compare well with previously proposed schemes which are important in graphical applications. It is invariant under the transformations of the Euclidean group. Furthermore, it is shape-preserving in that the quasi-circular spline approximation to a convex planar curve is also convex. Sufficient conditions for convergence are described, and O(h²) approximation to sufficiently smooth curves is demonstrated.     

Splines Generalizzate a supporto Minimo e Modificate

Sommario Vengono considerate splines generalizzate a supporto minimo (B-splines) e splines generalizzate modificate. Si stabiliscono teoremi di rappresentazione mediante tali splines.

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Generalized splines with smallest support (B-splines) and modified generalized splines are considered. Theorems of representation in terms of such splines are stated.

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Il lavoro è stato eseguito con una borsa di studio del C.N.R., sotto la direzione del Prof. W. Gross.     

Monotone Smoothing Splines using General Linear Systems

In this paper, a method is proposed to solve the problem of monotone smoothing splines using general linear systems. This problem, also called monotone control theoretic splines, has been solved only when the curve generator is modeled by the second‐order integrator, but not for other cases. The difficulty in the problem is that the monotonicity constraint should be satisfied over an interval which has the cardinality of the continuum. To solve this problem, we first formulate the problem as a semi‐infinite quadratic programming problem, and then we adopt a discretization technique to obtain a finite‐dimensional quadratic programming problem. It is shown that the solution of the finite‐dimensional problem always satisfies the infinite‐dimensional monotonicity constraint. It is also proved that the approximated solution converges to the exact solution as the discretization grid‐size tends to zero. An example is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Univariate Strip Interpolations by Nonlinear Parametric Splines

 In this paper, we develop algorithms for treating several constrained interpolation problems using the parametric cubic splines introduced in reference [11]. Explicit bounds for the parameters occurring in the spline class are given such that within these bounds the considered problems are always solvable. Received March 9, 2000     

Splines over regular triangulations in numerical simulation

We investigate the use of smooth spline spaces over regular triangulations as a tool in (isogeometric) Galerkin methods. In particular, we focus on box splines over three-directional meshes. Box splines are multivariate generalizations of univariate cardinal B-splines sharing the same properties. Tensor-product B-splines with uniform knots are a special case of box splines. The use of box splines over three-directional meshes has several advantages compared with tensor-product B-splines, including enhanced flexibility in the treatment of the geometry and stiffness matrices with stronger sparsity. Boundary conditions are imposed in a weak form to avoid the construction of special boundary functions. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach by means of a selection of numerical examples.     

Splines and high order interpolations in plasma simulations

Higher order interpolations in plasma simulations using particles have been studied in one dimension. Various schemes including quadratic and cubic splines and interpolation with Gaussian particles are tested when the Debye length is much smaller than the grid size. It is found that the effects of aliases and numerical instabilities can be neglected when the higher order schemes are employed in the simulation. It is suggested that the combination of higher order interpolations in the direction of magnetic field and linear interpolation in the cross section may be useful for three-dimensional simulations of magnetically confined plasmas for controlled fusion.     

Manifold-valued Thin-Plate Splines with Applications in Computer Graphics

We present a generalization of thin‐plate splines for interpolation and approximation of manifold‐valued data, and demonstrate its usefulness in computer graphics with several applications from different fields. The cornerstone of our theoretical framework is an energy functional for mappings between two Riemannian manifolds which is independent of parametrization and respects the geometry of both manifolds. If the manifolds are Euclidean, the energy functional reduces to the classical thin‐plate spline energy. We show how the resulting optimization problems can be solved efficiently in many cases. Our example applications range from orientation interpolation and motion planning in animation over geometric modelling tasks to color interpolation.     

G2 Tensor Product Splines over Extraordinary Vertices

We present a second order smooth filling of an n‐valent Catmull‐Clark spline ring with n biseptic patches. While an underdetermined biseptic solution to this problem has appeared previously, we make several advances in this paper. Most notably, we cast the problem as a constrained minimization and introduce a novel quadratic energy functional whose absolute minimum of zero is achieved for bicubic polynomials. This means that for the regular 4‐valent case, we reproduce the bicubic B‐splines. In other cases, the resulting surfaces are aesthetically well behaved. We extend our constrained minimization framework to handle the case of input mesh with boundary.