Abstract
Usual practice of the transformation of a B-spline curve into a set of piecewise polynomial curves in a power form is done by either a knot refinement followed by basis conversions or applying a Taylor expansion on the B-spline curve for each knot span. Presented in this paper is a new algorithm, called a direct expansion algorithm, for the problem. The algorithm first locates the coefficients of all the linear terms that make up the basis functions in a knot span, and then the algorithm directly obtains the power form representation of basis functions by expanding the summation of products of appropriate linear terms. Then, a polynomial segment of a knot span can be easily obtained by the summation of products of the basis functions within the knot span with corresponding control points. Repeating this operation for each knot span, all of the polynomials of the B-spline curve can be transformed into a power form. The algorithm has been applied to both static and dynamic curves. It turns out that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms for the conversion for both types of curves. Especially, the proposed algorithm shows significantly fast performance for the dynamic curves.
