A variational approach to spline curves on surfaces (Q2574276)

Given an \(m\)-dimensional surface \(\Phi\) in \({\mathbb R}^n\), the authors characterize parametric curves in \(\Phi\), which interpolate a sequence of given points in \(\Phi\), and minimize an energy functional. More precisely, the authors provide a characterization of the counterparts on surfaces to \(C^2\) cubic splines, to splines in tension and to \(C^4\) quintic splines. It turns out that differentiability at the interpolation points is the familiar one, but the characterization of spline segments is slightly different. Additionally, the paper focusses on the problem of approximating curves, in particular to the counterparts of smoothing splines. In view of the importance of tangentially cubic curves, some explicit representations of such curves on special surfaces are provided. In particular the authors address special tangentially cubic parametrizations of a curve. Finally, they outline some interesting applications in geometric modeling, computer graphics, robotics and image processing.