Contents

#### **Preface XI**



Preface

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*and biological studies*.

software developments and their extensions.

Splines are piecewise polynomials that are joined smoothly, and they provide a significant tool for the design of computationally economical curves and surfaces. This, in return, plays a critical role in the construction of various objects like automobiles, ship hulls, airplane fu‐ selages and wings, propeller blades, shoe insoles, bottles, etc. It also contributes in the de‐ scription of geological, physical, statistical, and even medical phenomena. Moreover, spline methods have also proven to be indispensable in a variety of modern industries, including *computer vision*, *robotics*, *signal and image processing*, *visualization*, *textile*, *graphic designs*, *art de‐ signs*, *painting*, *animations in the film industry*, *font designs in publishing*, and even *media*.

The major goals of this book are to stimulate views and provide a source where researchers and practitioners can find the latest developments in the field of splines. Due to speedy sci‐ entific developments, there is a great deal of thirst among the scientific community world‐ wide to be equipped with state-of-the-art theory and practice to get their problems solved in diverse areas of various disciplines. Although a good amount of work has been done by researchers, a tremendous interest is increasing every day due to complicated problems be‐ ing faced in the academia and industry, especially in areas where data are essential for re‐

This book aims to provide a valuable source on splines and their applications. It focuses on some interdisciplinary methods using splines. It targets to provide the user community with a variety of spline techniques and their applications necessary for various real-life problems. It also aims to collect and disseminate information in various disciplines including *computeraided geometric design, computer graphics, data visualization, data fitting, digital signal processing, power systems, clinical and epidemiologic studies, disease detection, regression curves, social media,*

This book has seven chapters consisting of several new advances in the area. These contribu‐ tions provide a modern, up-to-date literature review, theory, techniques, methodology, soft‐ ware developments, and applications. The book is useful for researchers, scientists, practitioners, and many others who seek state-of-the-art techniques and applications using splines. It is also useful for undergraduate senior students as well as graduate students in the areas of computer science, engineering, health science, statistics, and mathematics. An important feature of the book is that each chapter also provides useful information on the

The book begins with an exposition of splines from a numerical analysis point of view. The first chapter entitled "Scalar and Parametric Spline Curves and Surfaces" was prepared by Horacio Florez and Belsay Borges. In the absence of noise, their work tackles passing a curve/surface through a given set of data points. They first focus on the case in which the
