The surface/surface intersection problem by means of matrix based representations (Q714491)

Computing the intersection between two parameterized algebraic surfaces is an important problem in solid modeling. One way is to represent the implicit equation of one of the two surfaces as the determinant of a certain matrix, necessarily square, and the matrix itself is used as a representation of this first parameterized surface and then a matrix representation of the intersection curve is obtained. The limitation of this method is that only some surface parameterizations without base points can be represented by such matrices. Recently, non-square matrix representations of parameterized algebraic surfaces have been introduced and they extend to a dramatically larger class of rational parameterized surfaces. This paper introduces these more general matrix representations in the context of the surface/surface intersection problem, and an algorithm based on matrix operations is developed to represent the intersection curve of two such surfaces as the zero set of a matrix determinant. Therefore, the new result provides a better solution for the surface/surface intersection problem. Yet how to determine the computational complexity of this algorithm is a future work to do.