Non polynomial B-splines

Abstract

B-splines are the de facto industrial standard for surface modelling in Computer Aided design. It is comparable to bend flexible rods of wood or metal. A flexible rod minimize the energy when bending, a third degree polynomial spline curve minimize the second derivatives. B-spline is a nice way of representing polynomial splines, it connect polynomial splines to corner cutting techniques, which induces many nice and useful properties. However, the B-spline representation can be expanded to something we can call general B-splines, i.e. both polynomial and non-polynomial splines. We will show how this expansion can be done, and the properties it induces, and examples of non-polynomial B-spline.