Surface Fitting with Hierarchical Splines

We consider the fitting of tensor product parametric spline surfaces to gridded data. The continuity of the surface is provided by the basis chosen. When tensor product splines are used with gridded data, the surface fitting problem decomposes into a sequence of curve fitting processes, making the computations particularly efficient. The use of a hierarchical representation for the surface adds further efficiency by adaptively decomposing the fitting process into subproblems involving only a portion of the data. Hierarchy also provides a means of storing the resulting surface in a compressed format. Our approach is compared to multiresolution analysis and the use of wavelets.