Local linear independence of bilinear (and higher degree) B-splines on hierarchical T-meshes

Abstract

We generate hierarchical T-meshes by repeatedly inserting new line segments, in order to adapt both the size and the shape of the cells to the specific requirements of the underlying application. The associated spaces of bilinear spline functions are spanned by the locally refined (LR) B-splines of Dokken et al. (2013), which are products of univariate B-splines defined over local knot vectors. Our method guarantees that these functions are linearly independent for the obtained class of hierarchical T-meshes. Furthermore, they even possess the property of local linear independence, since exactly 4 functions take non-zero values on each cell of the mesh, and they form a partition of unity without the need to perform additional scaling or truncation.The correctness of our refinement algorithm is verified by enumerating the (newly introduced) local configurations, which represent the possible topologies of the mesh in the vicinity of a cell. It is then shown that the method works well in all the resulting situations. The fairly large number (385) of cases sheds some light on the challenges associated with linear independence in the context of LR B-spline refinement.Additionally we apply our method to meshes that possess the additional property local semi-regularity (first studied by Weller and Hagen, 1995), where only 49 topologically different situations may arise. However, we observe that the resulting class of hierarchical T-meshes is less flexible, which leads to a substantial amount of excess refinement in applications.Finally we note that the same construction can be applied to generate basis functions for Cs–smooth spline spaces of degree p=2s+1, again with the property of local linear independence.