Projecting Points onto Planar Parametric Curves by Local Biarc Approximation

Abstract

This paper proposes a geometric iteration algorithm for computing point projection and inversion on surfaces based on local biarc approximation. The iteration begins with initial estimation of the projection of the prescribed test point. For each iteration, we construct a 3D biarc on the original surface to locally approximate the original surface starting from the current projection point. Then we compute the projection point for the next iteration, as well as the parameter corresponding to it, by projecting the test point onto this biarc. The iterative process terminates when the projection point satisfies the required precision. Examples demonstrate that our algorithm converges faster and is less dependent on the choice of the initial value compared to the traditional geometric iteration algorithms based on single-point approximation.