SYMBOLIC AND NUMERIC COMPUTATION IN CURVE INTERROGATION

The control of shape of curves is of great importance in computer aided geometric design. Determination of planar curves' convexity, the detection of inflection points, coincident regions, and self intersection points, the enclosed area of a closed curve, and the locations of extreme curvature are important features of curves that can affect the design, in modelling environments. In this paper, we investigate the ability to robustly answer the above queries and related questions using an approach which exploits both symbolic computation and numeric analysis.