Formula for computing knots with minimum stress and stretching energies

Abstract

Computing knots for a given set of data points in a plane is one of the key steps in the construction of fitting curves with high precision. In this study, a new method is proposed for computing a parameter value (knot) for each data point. With only three adjacent consecutive data points, one may not determine a unique interpolation quadratic polynomial curve, which has one degree of freedom (a variable). To obtain a better curve, the stress and stretching energies are used to optimize this variable so that the quadratic polynomial curve has required properties, which ensure that when the three consecutive points are co-linear, the optimal quadratic polynomial curve constructed is the best. If the position of the mid-point of the three points lies between the first point and the third point, the quadratic polynomial curve becomes a linear polynomial curve. Minimizing the stress and stretching energies is a time-consuming task. To avoid the computation of energy minimization, a new model for simplifying the stress and stretching energies is presented. The new model is an explicit function and is used to compute the knots directly, which greatly reduces the amount of computation. The knots are computed by the new method with minimum stress and stretching energies in the sense that if the knots computed by the new method are used to construct quadratic polynomial, the quadratic polynomial constructed has the minimum stress and stretching energies. Experiments show that the curves constructed using the knots generated by the proposed method result in better interpolation precision than the curves constructed using the knots by the existing methods.