B ( asic ) - Spline Basics

This essay reviews those basic facts about (univariate) B-splines that are of interest in CAGD. The intent is to give a self-contained and complete development of the material in as simple and direct a way as possible. For this reason, the B-splines are defined via the recurrence relations, thus avoiding the discussion of divided differences which the traditional definition of a B-spline as a divided difference of a truncated power function requires. This does not force more elaborate derivations than are available to those who feel at ease with divided differences. It does force a change in the order in which facts are derived and brings more prominence to such things as Marsden’s Identity or the Dual Functionals than they currently have in CAGD. In addition, it highlights the following point: The consideration of a single B-spline is not very fruitful when proving facts about B-splines, even if these facts (such as the smoothness of a B-spline) can be stated in terms of just one B-spline. Rather, simple arguments and real understanding of B-splines are available only if one is willing to consider all the B-splines of a given order for a given knot sequence. Thus it focuses attention on splines, i.e., on the linear combination of B-splines. In this connection, it is worthwhile to stress that this essay (as does its author) maintains that the term ‘B-spline’ refers to a certain spline of minimal support and, contrary to usage unhappily current in CAGD, does not refer to a curve that happens to be written in terms of B-splines. It is too bad that this misuse has become current and entirely unclear why. The essay deals with splines for an arbitrary knot sequence and does rarely become more specific. In particular, the B(ernstein-Bézier)-net for a piecewise polynomial, though a (very) special case of a representation by B-splines, gets much less attention than it deserves, given its immense usefulness in CAGD (and spline theory). The essay deals only with spline functions. There is an immediate extension to spline curves: Allow the coefficients, be they B-spline coefficients or coefficients in some polynomial form, to be points in IR or IR. But this misses the much richer structure for spline curves available because of the fact that even discontinuous parametrizations may describe a smooth curve. Splines are of importance in CAD for the same reason that they are used wherever data are to be fit or curves are to be drawn by computer: being polynomial, they can be evaluated quickly; being piecewise polynomial, they are very flexible; their representation in terms of B-splines provides geometric information and insight. See Riesenfeld’s contribution in this volume for details concerning the use of splines and, especially, of their B-spline representation, in CAD. See Cox’ contribution for details concerning numerical algorithms to handle splines and their B-spline representation. The editor of this volume has asked me to provide a careful discussion of the placeholder notation customary in mathematical papers on splines. This notation was invented by people who think it important to distinguish the function f from its value f(x) at the point x. It is customarily used in the description of a function of one variable obtained