Curve and Surface Fitting with Splines (Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computation)

The fitting of a curve or surface through a set of observational data is a recurring problem across numerous disciplines such as applications. This book describes the algorithms and mathematical fundamentals of a widely used software package for data fitting with tensor product splines. It gives a survey of possibilities, benefits, and problems commonly confronted when approximating with this popular type of function. Dierkx demonstrates in detail how the properties of B-splines can be fully exploited for improving the computational efficiency and for incorporating different boundary or shape preserving constraints. Special attention is also paid to strategies for an automatic and adaptive knot selection with intent to obtain serious data reductions. The practical use of the smoothing software is illustrated with many theoretical and practical examples.