CAGD’s Top Ten: What to Watch

hile painless for the guest editor, these introductions might cause readers some pain. Still, I don’t want to waste this opportunity to tell you about interesting developments in computer-aided geometric design by giving you reason to hastily skim past these opening paragraphs. So, I abstracted a “top ten” list of what’s happening in CAGD based on ideas from recent conferences, technical papers, and informal discussions with my colleagues. I do not mean the list to be definitive. Some items might overlap, and the length and level of detail vary considerably. I want to paint a panorama of CAGD as a backdrop for the detailed foreground highlights represented by the collection of articles in the two special CAGD issues of IEEE CC&A, September 1992 and January 1993. This issue of CC&A contains the concluding part of the CAGD collection. The September 1992 issue offered articles on solid modeling, feature-based design, parametric surface interpolation, surface interrogation algorithms, nonuniform rational B-splines, interval Bezier curves, and Voronoi diagrams. This issue finishes with works on polar forms, cyclides, triangulations, scattered data modeling, surface-to-surface intersections, incremental boundary evaluation. and implicit curves and surfaces. I think the breadth and depth of topics provides excellent coverage of CAGD. So, what’s happening in CAGD right now that bears watching?