Curvature of singular Bézier curves and surfaces (Q551493)

When some of the first control points of a Bézier curve are the same, then the initial point of the curve is a singular point because the derivative of the curve at that point vanishes. Initially, the curvature at this point cannot be defined. Nevertheless, for some configurations the discontinuity of the curvature is removable. In this paper the authors present a general approach for finding the limit curvature at a singular endpoint of a rational Bézier curve. The removable discontinuities are characterized in terms of the control polygon. The same problem is also studied for a singular corner of a rational Bézier surface patch. In this case, conditions for a finite Gaussian and mean limit curvatures are expressed in terms of the rank of a matrix built from the control points. The method is based on the concept of order-of-contact. The main result is proved by finding an osculating parabola (in the case of rational Bézier curves) or osculating paraboloids (in the case of Bézier surfaces) of the appropriate order-of-contact.