Tight linear envelopes for splines (Q5952131)

The authors show how to bound the maximal distance between a spline and its B-spline control polygon in terms of second differences of the control points and linear interpolants of special piecewise convex and nonnegative splines that depend only on the knot sequence. The bound yields a piecewise linear envelope enclosing spline and polygon. This envelope is particularly simple for unifom splines and splines in Bernstein-Bézier form and shrinks by a factor of 4 for each uniform subdivision step [cf. \textit{E. Cohen} and \textit{L. L. Schumaker}, Comput. Aided Geom. Des. 2, 229-235 (1985; Zbl 0597.65003) and \textit{W. Dahmen}, J. Comput. Appl. Math. 16, 145-158 (1986; Zbl 0596.65003)].