Geodesic-like curves on parametric surfaces (Q631007)

The author presents an approximation method for computing geodesics on a parameterized surface. The idea is to approximate the parameterizations of curves on the surface by Bézier, \(B\)-spline or other parametric curves. The geodesic-like curve is then defined to be the curve which has minimal energy among all such curves with a prescribed number of control points. Thus, these curves are computed by solving a certain system of equations. It is shown that the geodesic-like curves converge towards a geodesic for increasing number of control points. At the end, the presented method is compared, by several numerical examples, to other well-known methods for computing geodesics.