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I am building a program where I need to simplify N number of points into a single section of a bezier spline, ie describe them using just 2 end points and 2 control points. Naturally this will lead to some loss of information, but I would like the spline section to be as accurate to the original points as possible.

The input will be points that are already on a reasonably smooth curve.

Any answer is appreciated! (That being said, I'm not very good with equations, so an explanation in words would be even more so).

Erik Verboom
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For one thing: That is not a spline interpolation, that is just a Bézier curve. Those are simply polynomial in specific bases.

A spline interpolation would consist of piecewise smooth functions so that the whole function has smooth differentiability to some degree.

So what you actually want: Find a cubic Bézier curve that describes your points optimally. But then, it does not matter that much if you have Bézier curves or just a regular monomial base.

What you can then do is simply regression: Take some $t_1,\ldots,t_N$ and the model $$ x(t) = a+bt+ct^2+dt^3 $$ $$ y(t) = e+ft+gt^2+ht^3 $$ or for Bézier representation $$ x(t) = aB_{0,3}+bB_{1,3}+cB_{2,3}+dB_{3,3} $$ $$ y(t) = eB_{0,3}+fB_{1,3}+gB_{2,3}+hB_{3,3} $$ Then consider the quadratic error $$ E(a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,t_1,\ldots,t_N) = \sum_{j=1}^N (x(t_j)-P_x^j)^2 + (y(t_j)-P_y^j)^2 $$ Then differentiate and equate to $0$ (easy if $t_1,\ldots,t_N$ are fixed, harder if they are variable as that will then involve finding multivariate roots, which might be solvable using Groebner bases) to find the paramters that minimize this error.

You can then take the minimum and the maximum of the $t_i$ and transform $x(t),y(t)$ to $[0,1]$.

Lazy
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  • If you want to preserve the order of the points, take $t_i<t_{i+1}$. If you then want to keep the $t_i$ variable but still want to have easy computability, try to set $t_1=0$, $t_N=1$ and vary the other $t_i$, for example by doing some gradient descent on them. – Lazy Oct 28 '21 at 08:52
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What you want is just a least-squares fit of a Bezier curve to your sequence of points. If you google this, you'll find plenty of results, including some code. For example, this is a very good recent discussion, and this site includes Java code.

Once you have assigned parameter values to your data points, you're left with a so-called "linear" least-squares problem, which is fairly easy to solve by standard techniques.

The mathematics is explained here or here. The first of these deals with b-spline curves, but Bezier curves are just a special case.

bubba
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