Bézier representation of conics of contact in the projective plane (Q1330465)

The authors consider conics which contact a plane curve in a point of second order (same tangent and curvature). The authors' main idea is to treat conics and more generally rational curves as elements of a suitable projective space. They use only tools of projective differential geometry for the investigations of the geometric properties of rational curves. A representation as rational quadratic Bézier curves is derived. Based on this representation, a condition is formulated which characterizes second-order contact of two plane curves. These results are applied to the problem of connecting tangent elements by conic segments with continuous curvature at the junction points. Although most of the formulated results are known, the authors think that it is useful to publish their approach because the methods of projective differential geometry are not very popular in the field of computer aided geometric design.