Constructing parametric quadratic curves (Q1300777)

Constructing a parametric spline curve to pass through a set of data points requires assigning a knot to each data point. In this paper the authors discuss the construction of parametric quadratic splines and present a new method to assign knots to a set of planar data points. The new method is compared with the chord length method, the centripedal method, the Foley-Nielson method and the ZCM method. Advantages of the new method include: the determined knots are invariant under affine transformations of the data points, quadratic spline curves constructed using this method can reproduce parametric polynomials of degree two exactly.