APPROXIMATE TANGENT VECTOR AND GEOMETRIC CUBIC HERMITE INTERPOLATION

In this paper we introduce a discrete tangent vector of a polygon defined on each vertex by a linear combination of forward difference and backward difference, and show that if the polygon is originated from a smooth curve then direction of the discrete tangent vector is a second order approximation of the direction of the tangent vector of the original curve. Using this discrete tangent vector, we also introduced the geometric cubic Hermite interpolation of a polygon with controlled initial and terminal speed of the curve segments proportional to the edge length. In this case the whole interpolation is $C^1$. Experiments suggest that about $90\%$ of the edge length is the best fit for the initial and terminal speeds.