Abstract
An inflection point on a curve is a point where the curvature vanishes. An inflection point is useful for various geometric operations such as the approximation of curves and intersection points between curves or curve approximations. An inflection point on planar Bezier curves can be easily detected using a hodograph and a derivative of hodograph, since the closed from of hodograph is known. In the case of rational Bezier curves, for the detection of inflection point, it is needed to use the first and the second derivatives have higher degree and are more complex than those of non-rational Bezier curvet. This paper presents three methods to detect inflection points of rational Bezier curves. Since the algorithms avoid explicit derivations of the first and the second derivatives of rational Bezier curve to generate polynomial of relatively lower degree, they turn out to be rather efficient. Presented also in this paper is the theoretical analysis of the performances of the algorithms as well as the experimental result.
