Approximation of parametric surfaces (Q1305501)

While the high accuracy approximation of parametric curves by geometric splines has attained a high level of standard only few attemps have been made for surfaces. Clearly, there are different schemes in use, however an error estimation or investigations of the order of approximation are missing. This problem was recently attacked by G. Mehl. She proved that an arbitrary triangular surface path with planar boundary curves can be approximated by cubic triangular Bézier surfaces with the approximation of order five. In this paper a general method to determine the approximation order of a triangular surface segment with the planar boundary curves by a suitable Bézier path is investigated. The methods of this paper are based on the affine invariance of the approximation order and uses special adapted coordinate systems. As an example the case of a quadratic Bézier approximant is woked out in detail.