FIRST ORDER HERMITE INTERPOLATION WITH SPHERICAL PYTHAGOREAN-HODOGRAPH CURVES

The general stereographic projection which maps a point on a sphere with arbitrary radius to a point on a plane stereographically and its inverse projection have the pythagorean-hodograph (PH) preserving property in the sense that they map a PH curve to another PH curve. Upon this fact, for given spatial $C^1$ Hermite data, we construct a spatial PH curve on a sphere that is a $C^1$ Hermite interpolant of the given data as follows: First, we solve $C^1$ Hermite interpolation problem for the stereographically projected planar data of the given data in $\mathbb{R}^3$ with planar PH curves expressed in the complex representation. Second, we construct spherical PH curves which are interpolants for the given data in $\mathbb{R}^3$ using the inverse general stereographic projection.