Uniform refinement of curves (Q1118332)

The authors present a unified approach to subdivision algorithms for the generation of curves by uniform refinement, i.e. at each iteration the same smoothing strategy is used. In particular, the algorithms encompass the well-known de Casteljau method for Bernstein-Bézier curves and the Lane-Riesenfeld method for B-spline curves. For a general family of smoothing techniques, a systematic study of properties of the limiting curves is given. Let \(f=(f_ 1,...,f_ n)\), where \(f_ i: [0,1]\to {\mathbb{R}}\), \(i=1,...,n\), are real-valued functions, and let a vector \(c\in ({\mathbb{R}}^ d)^ n\) be given. The curve cf: [0,1]\(\to {\mathbb{R}}^ d\) is called uniformly refinable with scale \(p\in {\mathbb{N}}\) if there exist (n\(\times n)\)-matrices \(B_ 0,...,B_{p-1}\) such that \(cf[i/p,\quad (i+1)/p]=(B_ ic)f[0,1],\) \(i=0,...,p-1\). An important fact of the investigations is that the curves obtained by the subdivision algorithms possess this property. In addition, the results show that there is a close relationship between smoothness properties of the limiting curves and the existence of polynomial components.